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The Seller's Guide to the Buyer's Home Inspection
The home inspector can keep a buyer from walking into a money pit, but what if you are the seller? As a home seller, this guide will help you identify potential problems with your house before the home inspector finds them.
Why You Should Read It?
A few minutes reading this guide and bit of preparation before putting your home on the market will save you thousands of dollars.
I put this informational guide together for my clients who are selling their homes. It helps keep surprises to a minimum and that helps to make a smooth selling experience. Inside you will find...
- Common mistakes that sellers make.
- What can you wait to fix until after the inspection?
- Find out what buyers fear most.
- Should you do a pre-inspection inspection?
- Simple considerations that can save you thousands.
- If there is a problem, do you have to tell the buyers?
- and more...
Excerpt from The Seller's Guide to the
Buyer's Home Inspection
4. Foundation and crawl space - Water under the house can lead to mold and termites. And nothing scares buyers more than mold and termites. Every mortgage lender will require a clean “Moisture and Termite Inspection.” This is separate from the buyer initiated home inspection and is part of the purchase agreement. It is usually written into a purchase contract that the buyer is obligated to spend up to 1% of the purchase price to make the repairs required to get a clean moisture/termite letter.
If the crawl space is wet, the first thing you should do is to make sure that the soil around the foundation slopes away from the house. Ensure that the gutters are draining far enough away from the house so that the water isn’t flowing back into the crawl space. Nine times out of ten, taking these steps will solve the problem.
It is well worth your effort to take care of this ahead of time because most companies doing the moisture/termite report will charge $2500 to fix a wet crawl space and you won’t have a choice in the matter. This includes sealing the foundation and installing a dehumidifier. Sometimes all that is really needed is some soil and gutter extensions.
I have a contract with a termite company
Not all termite companies are created equal. For example, Terminix will not issue a moisture letter, just a clean termite letter. Just because you are under contract does not mean there won’t be problems. Recently I was involved with a home that had a termite contract. There was standing water under the house due to poor drainage. The seller had to pay $2500 to replace damaged floor joists and beams and $2500 to encapsulate the crawl space. There were no termites so the termite contract was worthless to them. There are several reputable companies that would not have let this happen. I use Hampton Roads Termite.
