Speaker 1: Welcome back everyone to Ready, Set, Sell. Thanks so much for staying with us. Just to kind of recap what we talked about was getting a home protection plan. Just so you know, those are not paid until closing until the house is sold. One of the things I failed to mention, they run usually $500 or less. More and more sellers are getting the protection plan that protects them during the course of the, while the house is on the market.
It’s like Murphy’s Law. You know, air conditioning unit goes out, you still own the home, that could e a major, major expense. So usually for like $75-80 more, so maybe $550-565, something like that, you can have that protection, so in case that something does go wrong, you want to make sure that that’s covered.
Home protection plans are fantastic. Highly recommend them. Most sellers already get that. So let’s talk about the home inspection. Now the home inspection is something that’s going to happen. In fact, it’s so rare, it hardly ever happens that a buyer doesn’t have a home inspection done. There are a few exceptions, but not many.
And the home inspection, if you don’t know what that is, that’s a licensed home inspector will come in, and they will do from the very bottom of your house where there’s a crawlspace or a basement to the very top of your house. They can range between two and three hours. Some of them have a 160 point checklist that they will check everything. They will check how hot your water is. Does the plumbing work? Do the toilets flush? Do all the GFIs, electrical boxes, work? It just goes through the, they’ll look at your electrical panel. They literally look at the heating and cooling. I think you get the idea. They literally go through this entire house and here’s the thing that probably … They are liken to the IRS. They will find something. They will find something.
I was talking to an inspector that his company has done well over 10,000 inspections. And I just asked him, well have you ever had one that just went by? Now over 10,000 inspections and he said, I think one. So they’re going to find something. And it just works that way. Where the problem comes in, and the problem with home inspections is, and this is something you need to know as far as a seller, the minor stuff, not such a big thing. You can get that taken care of, you can get that fixed, the buyer or seller, no big deal. It’s the big stuff that can come in. There are really four things that can knock out a buyer can walk away from. The seller, it doesn’t matter if they’re gonna fix it or they’re not.
Number one is structural. Number two is water. Number three, and water meaning water in the basement, some type of water coming into the house in some way. Naturally a roof would be that too. And number three would be termite or pest. Meaning is this, and that could be structural too, but that could be a problem there too. And then we have environmental. Environmental can be a range of different things. It could be the whole house infected with radon, we’ll talk about that a little bit later. Or something of those nature. Something, a chemical, that was left in there. Very rare. So usually radon is what you’re really talking about. But that can be an environmental defect.
So, just so you understand as a seller, those are four walk away positions. It doesn’t mean that buyers will, but they can walk away. Doesn’t mean if you agree to fix it or not. The reason why I bring that up is the home inspection. We’ve seen this happen. We’ve seen a situation where up into the rafters, into the attic, where the seller never went, there was a wood, and I can’t remember exactly what they called it, but basically it was supporting of the roof. It was one of the beams. Now it was one of the beams of like 25, it was cracked. The buyer bailed.
Now this creates a lot more problems than just losing a potential buyer. The other problem is usually this is, then often your house has been off the market for seven to ten days. So you’ve got the inspections. This is what’s came of it. And so you’ve lost that potential other buyers out there that could’ve bought your house. That’s number one.
Number two is when you fail a home inspection, it may sound like it’s a minor thing and that you were willing to fix it, but it puts doubt many times in buyers minds. So the new buyers coming in have doubt. That’s never a good thing. The third thing that also creates is that when you doubt, you also have a situation of value. So now you have time, you have doubt, and in most cases, not all, when an inspection goes bad, and the buyer walks away, the seller usually gets less money.
Not counting the days on market now that you’ve been on. We’ve talked about your true cost of having a house on the market. That’s your taxes and insurance, and that’s your principle and interest, and that’s utilities. All those things add up. $1500-2000, it just depends when you put everything together, HOAs. So again, you lose two weeks, you lose another $1000. And also just the aggravation. Just the aggravation. The shock.
On the home inspection, and this might be the biggest thing to understand when we talk about this home inspection, has the same consequences of offer and acceptance. So when you were negotiating, and we’ll just say $150,000, and you both came to agreement on $150,000. And the closing date. You have offer and acceptance.
If you were $149,900, and the other person was $149,800, you don’t have a deal. You don’t have offer and acceptance. Both parties didn’t meet the mind. Same thing with the home inspection. If both parties don’t agree on the home inspection, the buyer and the seller at times, now that doesn’t happen too often, but will, can walk away from the deal. Boom. It’s over. That’s the thing you need to understand when you’re dealing with the home inspection.
Radon. We’ve seen situations where it’s untrue, we’ve never heard any facts to back it up, radon is found. And that’s a non-odorous gas that almost all, again buyers have that inspection done. Same thing. One situation, a buyer thought that they had radon and it seeped into the house. Again, it’s not true, as I mentioned before, but they walked away.
Number three, is I talked about the water. Having water in crawlspaces is usually the biggest issue. Same situation. Nobody goes in the crawlspace, they have the inspection, they found water in there, buyers have the right to walk away. It doesn’t happen every day. I don’t want to give that impression, but understanding, when it does happen, it has severe consequences. That’s the thing about with real estate that most people I think understand, but make sure that your agent understands that too.
And then again, it doesn’t come up quite as much, but again, termites can come into play. You can have that issue there. So if we have a house that had basically everything was going great, they had a termite/pest inspection and everything went down the tubes. The buyers walked away. It wasn’t the sellers wasn’t going to fix it. The buyers just lost confidence. And again it creates another series of events to go on.
So now, we’re going to have to figure out in the next segment, how do we get past that? Since we know this is coming, how do we get past that? And we’ll be talking about that in the next segment. In the meantime, go get the book. The book is free. It’s value is $10. It’s paperback, so it’s something you can read in your hands. All you need to do is go to readysetsell.org, not .com, readysetsell.org, not .com, and get the book. People have been getting the book ever since I’ve been on the show, and it’s been growing, growing and we couldn’t be happier. We want to get this information out to people.
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