3 Tips for Finding the Best Home Inspector for Your Home Inspection:

 

Of course, if you were buying a home in San Antonio, Texas area I would tell you to give me a call as you won’t find anyone better (probably, maybe), but I don’t travel all over the world.

Finding a good home inspector to perform your home inspection is an important step to finding a good home. A good home inspection report is going to outline deficiencies with a property and a good inspector is going to explain to you what is going on with a home. A good home inspector is going to leave a good impression on you, the seller and the real estate agents involved and be someone you may contact in the future with questions.

If I had friends or family buying a home across the country from me, and I couldn’t find an online reference for them, I would recommend they follow a few words of advice to make the process of hiring the best home inspector they can get easier. When calling around and talking to different home inspectors, I would recommend they keep the following in mind:

 

Ask the home inspector how long their average home inspection takes, and how long they expect your home inspection to take.

I always stress to my potential clients over the phone how much time I take to inspect their property, because I know most other home inspectors are not taking the time needed to really look over a house. I find that the average home (about 20 years old and about 1800 sqft, slab foundation) takes about 2.5-3 hours under most circumstances, excluding extra inspection items like sprinklers or wood-destroying insect inspections. I also find that when I ask many of my peers how long they take for an average inspection, I am frequently disappointed to hear some of them say “an hour and a half”, as I know that you can’t possibly be going everywhere that you need to go to inspect a house in that time frame unless you are rushing yourself or just glancing over things.

Look for a home inspector who is going to take more time to inspect your home, even if they charge a bit more than the other people. It’s worth it to get things done right.

 

Make sure your home inspector will allow you to meet them at the end of the inspection to review or talk to you on the phone.

I don’t think it is reasonable to ask the inspector to follow them around while they are inspecting; its very distracting and won’t help you get a better inspection. But I do think that every homebuyer deserves the right to talk to their inspector after the inspection to ask the inspector questions and hear directly from the inspector what they think the home’s biggest problems are. If the inspector you are talking to does not allow this, that’s an easy “no” from me.

 

Ask for a sample home inspection report from all of them. This will give you an idea of the quality of a home inspector by allowing you to compare and contrast their inspection reports with that of their peers in the same area.

 

Finding a good home inspector outside of San Antonio, Texas isn’t easy, but if you follow the above three guidelines, you can make it a lot easier on yourself!