When Selling a Home Who Pays For The Inspection

When selling a home, who pays for the inspection? 

Well, this could go either way. It could be the buyer paying or the seller paying, and I’ll tell you at least in Orange County, California, what I’ve seen as being typical is that, usually, the buyer is paying for their own home inspection, and why is that? 

Well, because a home in Orange County, California is sold typically under the residential purchase agreement where it says the home is being sold in it’s current “as is” condition subject to an inspection. So what that means is, when a buyer is making an offer on a house, they’re doing it based on what they can see, okay, we like what we see, and we’ll offer this price, however, it is subject to them also conducting a more in-depth inspection, and if we find some considerable issues, then we might have to renegotiate.  

So, typically with an inspection, the inspector’s job is really to nitpick the heck out of everything, but we’re not looking for cosmetic issues.  We’re mostly looking for structural issues, safety issues or systems issues that, you might need to replace all the plumbing or something like that? If you come across those types of issues, then you might have to renegotiate. 

So, typically, because of that, the buyers want to have that inspection done so firstly they can assure themselves that, they’re buying a good, quality home, and if not, then they can make an educated decision as to whether or not to continue with the purchase or renegotiate or just proceed. At least they know about it and now they can deal with it at a later date. 

When do sellers pay for home inspections? One of the things that I always tell sellers is it’s always a good idea to have a home inspection prior to putting your home on the market, and then they pay for it. 

What does a home inspection cost? Three, four, $500, something like that depending on the size of the house, could be more. The reason that the seller would have a home inspection is because when you live in your house, you get comfortable and you get used to things, and there could be a defect, there could be something wrong. You might just say, well, it’s fine, you know, we’ve lived with it for years, it’s not a big deal, but when a buyer moves in, it’s a big deal, it really is, even though it’s a used house.  

So, when you have that inspection as a seller upfront, you can start to deflect that conversation of “oh my gosh, there’s all these things wrong” because as the seller now, this inspection becomes part of the disclosures.  It’s like you saying, “look, we told you that one of the bathroom faucets is leaky. We told you that there was, you know, a valve that wasn’t working. We told you that this, this and this” via the inspection. Now as part of their disclosures, they have to look through it and acknowledge receipt of that report.  

The buyers have a certain timeframe to get through that whole inspection and respond. They will quickly have to decide if they are going to request repairs or request a credit of some kind in order to have those repairs done or do they just accept it the way that it is or, for that matter, or just cancel the transaction because they don’t want to deal with the roof falling down, or that sort of thing. 

So it’s a good idea to have a home inspection before you list for that very reason and you can avoid a lot of the secondary negotiations by doing just that.