How much Does a Home Inspection Cost?
This is one of the most common questions googled when it comes to home inspections.
With enough research, you may find inspection services that run from a couple hundred dollars to close to a thousand dollars, which is a broad range. These search results are varied and often unclear as to WHY an inspector charges what they do.
You get what you Pay For.
The adage rings true in most, any service-based industry. You get what you pay for, and there’s almost always someone who ‘will do it cheaper’. When making a large purchase such as a home that can have decades long ramifications on your finances, going with the cheapest option should give pause. Even worse would be foregoing the inspection all-together. That’s why, when choosing an Inspector, the focus should be on value provided by the inspector and not merely on the cost.
Value Provided by the Inspector
The role of the inspector is to identify and report in writing things that require repair or could lead to other issues if not corrected. To elaborate on this, if you pay $500 and the Inspector finds issues that cost $5,000 and you can re-negotiate that money at closing. That’s an immediate tangible savings.
However, the value of a quality inspector is not merely the tangible dollars saved, but the intangible. The knowledge, expertise and time spent during and after the inspection, documenting and answering questions. The future time and money saved by finding issues early or by identifying preventative maintenance items to stop future problems.
Our baseline time for an inspection is between 2.5 and 3 hours and goes up quickly based on the size of the house. This allows us to slow down and take a methodical approach to the inspection.
Ultimately, It’s the knowledge, experience, training, tools, references, information and guidance that a quality inspector brings to the table when performing the inspection that provides incalculable value, and THAT is what you are paying for. That is the value we are providing for the simple cost of the inspection.
For instance, at Tech Inspect, we have hundreds if not thousands of hours of training and experience, plus thousands of dollars invested in tools and software to help us serve our clients and provide the best inspection possible with industry leading reports.
After reading this, we should all be wondering, how is the ‘I will do it cheaper’ inspector bringing that level of value to the inspection? Or are they?
If you go with the ‘will do it cheaper’ inspector, you might always be wondering, was the inspection even worth it?