People often ask me if they should get a pre-listing inspection of their home and I always say YES.
There are many reasons for this:
1. You know what you need to fix (or decide not to fix) before you have a potential buyer standing before you, stars in their eyes, wanting to make an offer on your home.
2. This helps you (and me!) avoid sleepless nights where you worry about the roof, and the leaking bathroom faucet, and the squeaky stair step and so on. It’s like turning the light on and watching the monsters scatter.
Trust me, it’s better to know that you need to replace the kitchen faucet before you put your home on the market, than it is for a possible buyer to discover that you need to replace it.
Buyers like to think that you have repaired and replaced everything that needed it, the second it needed it. Of course they didn’t do that with their own home, but at this point it doesn’t matter. You are trying to sell your house as quickly as possible for as much money as possible and it needs to be in EXCELLENT shape.
It’s just very bad form to have a possible buyer come in, try to turn the garage light on and get nothing. It’s even worse to have the seller then say, “Oh it does that all the time! Here, I just need to flip a switch in the circuit box.”
Sure, you the seller are just used to these little glitches in your home but the buyer is not! And this is NOT the market in which you can afford to let things go. People tell me all the time, “If the buyers mention it and want me to fix that, I can, that’s fine.” No!! No, no, no, no, no!!! Fix it before the buyers ever set one foot in your door. I can’t emphasize that enough.
3. The buyers will likely request an independent inspection, and if their inspector takes issue with something your inspector didn’t it may be back to the negotiating table, which is okay.
4. In a slower market it helps make your home more marketable.
