Does a Home Inspector Check for Termites?

Yes, all Inspectors at Ensure Home Inspections are licensed with the Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA) as Termite Technicians and are allowed to perform Wood-Destroying Insect (WDI) inspections, but most home inspectors in San Antonio and Texas at large are not. Whether a home inspector needs specific licensing to perform termite inspections in other states I can’t comment on.

Ath the time of writing, Ensure Home Inspections only performs WDI inspections when requested, and we charge an additional fee to do so. Some home inspectors that perform WDI may include it in their base price and call it “free”, but you can expect a higher base price because of this.

In Texas, many inspectors who do perform WDI inspections are actually “employees” of a pest control business, which holds our licenses and reviews and stores our WDI reports. This is because while a Termite Technician is qualified to inspect for termites, they still need to be employed by a Structural Pest Control Business. For this reason, some inspectors start their own pest control company to avoid having to work with a third party. I personally have had nothing but sucess working with my pest control business, which I have been working with for over 5 years.

We do recommend that at first contact with a prospective home inspector, you make sure to ask if they are qualified to perform the WDI inspections themselves or will contract it out to a third party, if at all. This could save you a lot of headache hiring a seperate technician to perform the WDI when the home inspector can do it themselves.

Termite inspections in all instances are presented as a separate report that termite technicians are required to use, as created by the TDA. This report contains information as to whether any active or previous wood-destroying insect infestations were discovered, as well as conducive conditions discovered that would make it easier for insects to infest your home. Typical conducive conditions would include a wood fence attached to the structure at one or more locations, wood to ground contact such as a wooden deck or lumber leaning against the home, as well as soil that is too high and too close to the wall cladding.

Important to note that in the State of Texas, technicians are trained to identify wood-destroying insects, not organisms (WDO) such as in some states. This means that wood-destroying organisms like mold will not be included in the WDI report.