The Right to a Home Inspection

Why we insist on home inspection:

Since 2020, our company has been swimming against the current when we insist that all our clients get home inspections. We are fiduciary agents; that means we need to give sound financial advice. It is not sound financial advice for a buyer’s agent to suggest that a buyer forego a home inspection. That is our opinion, and we are sticking to it.

A house hunter may see ten — or even fifty — houses before they buy one. Collectively, our agents have seen over 10,000 houses. A buyer, with their limited experience, does not have a snowball’s chance in Hell of being confident about the condition of a house based on seeing their ten or twenty or fifty houses. They need a home inspector.

The median age of houses in Massachusetts is 49-59. [source] A lot can happen to a house over fifty years, and there are lots of 100+ year old places, too. Buyers need an expert to look at the story of the house’s maintenance to see if that story makes sense. Every year or two, one of the inspectors finds a house with a problem that will cost over $100,000 to fix, or a problem that will never go away.

We have attended hundreds of home inspections. In most inspections, we learn something new about how houses go wrong.

We have a lot of experience and can spot some of these kinds of problems now. We still don’t know what a home inspector knows. We don’t spend hours looking at the house systems the way and inspector would. That is why we insist that a home inspection brings vital information to the decision about whether to buy a particular house or not.

Buyers being bullied out of home inspections:

Massachusetts has a two-contract system for purchasing a house.

The first contract is an Offer to Purchase. This is a short-term contract that has the price and terms for the sale. There are contingency clauses in the standard forms that allow the prospective buyer to have a home inspection, by a certain date, and a second clause allowing the prospective buyer to get their deposits back if they cannot get a mortgage to purchase the property. In Boston-area purchases, the inspection is completed before the next contract is signed.

The Offer to Purchase is the basis for the Purchase and Sales Agreement, which has more detailed legal language about the quality of the Deed, and the conditions expected at closing. The second contract typically still has the clause that protects the buyer from losing their deposit if they do not get their mortgage.

When the housing shortage and high demand gave sellers more offers to choose from, buyers started hearing that the seller wanted them to forego home inspection. Many buyers buckled under the pressure and passed on their right to inspection.

Our clients didn’t. They either got an inspection before making the offer or they included a contingency for inspection. It was common for prospective buyers to come to our office to interview us and be surprised that all our clients got home inspections; they thought no one was allowed to do that anymore. It was never not allowed, but a significant number of sellers were pressuring buyers to buy without an inspection.

There ought to be a law protecting a buyer’s right to have a home inspection!

The presence of a contingency paragraph on the Offer to Purchase gives the seller and opportunity to ask a buyer into foregoing their right to inspection. The proposed Bills in both houses of our legislature seeks to remove those clauses from standard use. Instead of a clause to opt in or out of inspection, it  is a given for every purchase. Every buyer has the right, until a certain date. The seller does not have the option to pressure the buyer to not have an inspection when the seller is choosing between offers.

The Bill is called. An Act Protecting Consumer Rights in Purchasing Safe and Habitable Homes.

Senate Bill 193 and House Bill 2474.

Call to Action! What can you do?

1. Find your State Representative and Senator

Write an email. Call your legislator to support these Bills. If you can tell you story of why a home inspection helped you buy the right house (or kept you from buying the wrong one!), do that!

Here is some sample language, if you don’t want to reinvent the wheel. However, the more personal you can make this, the better for future buyers.

[Introduce yourself in regard to buying a home.]

I bought my house on [some date] and had a home inspection. I am pleased we did this because…

I tried to purchase on [some date] and was pressured by the seller to give up my home inspection contingency. This was a bad experience for me because…

I bought a house without a home inspection in some date because the seller would not accept an offer with a home inspection. It was a problem for me because …

Getting a home inspection is common sense. I would want a mechanic to inspect a used car, it only makes sense that a home inspector should inspect a used house. If you buy a clunker of a car, there are Lemon Laws in place to protect you. There is no Lemon Law if you buy a clunker of a house, which is a much more expensive purchase with potentially much more expensive repairs that could be found before purchase.

2. Please forward this to friends, family, and associates who appreciate the protective value of a good home inspection.