Inspections on your New Orleans Condos, once you have an accepted contract...
Once you have a purchase agreement signed and agreed upon you will have a period to do an inspection on the condo. This inspection normally takes place in the 10-15 days following acceptance. During this period the buyer can hire a professional inspector to check out all the systems and mechanics of a condo. The sooner it gets done the better as some followup work may be needed.
The buyer finds an inspector or two he wishes. I have several that will do the basic inspection for $175 if its in a complex. Each will issue you a report.
I suggest two types of inspections depending upon the type of condo you are buying. If you a condo in a converted home with a small number of units then you need to appraoch it more like a home. Any negatives with the house or complex could be found on the inspection. If there is something wrong found in the futute in a 4 plex then the expense for you can easily be 25% of the bill.
In larger complexes of 20 or more unit there is less of a chance of major defects and the building has generally undergone many more inspections. The cost is spread over many more people so the cost is like 2% of the expense.
In either case I recommend getting a separate a/c and heat guy to really check the system in depth. This would be a big expense if the unit were to fail. The cost is a little over a $100 and you have a written report if you need to claim against a home warranty. There is so much less that can go wrong in a condo very few deals ever fall apart on inspections. I can vnever remember one happening to me.
Once the inspection is complete you will feel much better about the purchase if all goes well. We are then set to negotiate the defects with the seller. Most of the time I have found the condo sellers to be agreeable to doing the repairs or giving an allowance.
Allowances are great if we can be sure of the exact cost to repair. If we are not sure then it is better to have the seller do the repairs and have the surprises of paying more. The seller will give us receipts for the repairs. We will check the repairs before the act of sale depending upon the extend of the repairs to when we do it. Many times we do it at the final walk through and other times we may make an extra trip for larger items. We want the more technical items to be fixed by a professional and not the brother in law.
On the final walk through we not only check out the repair items but any damage that may have happened since the inspection. Checking out the major systems is a great idea. I had one not that long ago that the a/c did not work at the final walk through. The sellers had been gone about 20 days and the compressor went out. It was a $1600 last minute repair several hours before closing. Not what you want to happen but it does happen for the buyer and seller at the last minute. Best just to double check the condo one last time to be sure........
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