Should You Get a Home Inspection Before Closing on a House?

Does location still matter most? Should you remodel your home to suit your tastes, or for resale value? Are starter homes still a thing? We all have plenty of questions about the ever-changing world of real estate. In our Ask an Agent series, we’re partnering with experts at Better Homes & Gardens Real Estate to answer your biggest questions about finding, buying, and selling a home.

Should you shell out for a home inspection before closing on a house? Buyers get them to check if there are going to be any big surprises in the house that might run renovation costs up or to give them a leg up during price negotiations. Lots of people do it just for their peace of mind, and others choose to skip the step entirely. 

Once a non-negotiable step taken by buyers before even settling on an asking price, home inspections have now slackened in their necessity. While the market suffocates with all the stiffening competition, buyers are trying to remain competitive by waiving home inspections. Should you still get one? And if you do, will it throw you out of the game?

For this installment of Ask an Agent, we spoke with John O’Reilly of Better Homes & Gardens Real Estate Base Camp about whether getting a home inspection is still a (possible) necessity.

Ask an Agent: Should You Get a Home Inspection Before Closing on a House?

We’ve been in a feeding frenzy for the last six or seven years in real estate. So people have been waving inspections and appraisals. That’s not good practice. But unfortunately, there’s a lot of people that do it.

You don’t want to buy somebody else’s headache. Not only are you paying top of the market for the house today, but you could be getting into a place where you have to make some substantial improvements. Just make sure you go in with your eyes wide open.

In the market we’ve been in, it’s been competitive. So when you have one house with 20 buyers, those buyers are going to make the terms of that contract as good-looking as they can to the seller. Part of that thought process is, “If I want this house, and there’s 15 other offers, I have to give something that nobody else will give to the seller so that I stand out. And that’s really what’s been driving that. 

There are other ways to go around that; you can actually go into the showing and bring somebody in to check the crawl space, look at the roof, make sure there’s no mold, walk up the attic and see if there’s any signs of water intrusion from the roof. It’s called a walkthrough inspection. It takes 20 minutes and they give you a quick overview of what they see. But a full home inspection is really a must in a normal market.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.