The “Perfect Storm”----Home Inspectors and Foreclosures
Below is a great post by Charles Buell who is among the top Seattle area home inspectors.
In my neck of the woods--that is, Clallam County which includes Port Angeles and Sequim--I estimate about two out of three houses I inspect right now are foreclosures or short sales. As Charles mentions below, some prior owners beat up these houses pretty good before leaving. I have seen everything from cabinets, doors, and light fixtures stripped out of the house to rotting fish in the attic. Just the other day I inspected a house where the gas generator had been "removed" without turning the gas off or capping the gas line. Needless to say, you could smell the gas from fifteen or so feet away. Spooky!
On a similar note, I recently read an article in the Seattle Times that stated "about one in five pending sales contingent on inspection falls through now... Not long ago... the ratio was more like 1 in 20." The article can be found here: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2010896889_homes27.html.
Ultimately, I think it is worth noting that home inspections are only one of many things that could "kill a deal." If anything, the inspection report could be the final nail in the coffin for some folks only after having lending issues, buyers remorse, finding another house they like better, and so on.
Another example of “collateral damage” in the current Real Estate mess----that most of the country finds itself----is that more and more home inspectors are becoming un-intentional “deal killers”----including this Seattle Home Inspector.
Before the bubble burst, it was much less common for a home inspector to kill a deal in such a way that the house might not sell in a timely fashion. This was because if one buyer walked away there might be 10 others waiting in the wings. Previously, while a home inspector might nix the deal for a particular agent involved, the sale at least would likely happen even if it was for some other agent----and in a timely fashion.
Nowadays it seems, with so many distressed properties for sale, there are a great many more issues that come up that justify more caution on the part of buyers----especially first time buyers without the cash reserves to fix the additional issues found at these properties. The result is that more buyers walk away after the inspection----and it is more likely that there are not going to be ten people waiting in the wings----and that the house is not going to be sold in a timely fashion.
The odds are stacked against a house having been properly maintained----if the owner was not able to pay the mortgage in the first place.
Add to this that some of these homes get vandalized by unhappy owners being forced to leave, or that homes are trashed by being winterized and we end up with the “perfect storm” for the home inspector to “write a book” about. Many of these places look like they have been hit by a tornado ----followed by a hurricane to “smooth things over.”
Please remember (for the most part) inspectors are not “deal killers.” Each house has a “story”----we merely write that story down. For many of these properties, it would be splitting hairs to say that it might be possible for the home inspector to write the report in such-and-such a manner so as to negate the tornado and the hurricane. It is up to the agent to sort out how these storms have compromised the deal.
It likely had nothing to do with the agents or the home inspectors.
Charles Buell
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