Does a $450 inspection make sense when the problem it finds costs $200 to fix

Question

Closed on a fourplex in Riverside last March and paid $575 for the full inspection. Inspector flagged a bathroom exhaust fan that wasn't venting to the exterior, just dumping into the attic. HVAC guy I called quoted $190 to reroute it. So I paid $385 more than the problem cost me. I still think I would do it again because I didn't know what else was in that attic, but I'm genuinely unsure where the cutoff is. At what repair estimate does the inspection fee stop making sense?

zainab_h · Answer

The cutoff question is backwards in my experience. On a lease option in Colton last year I paid $525 for an inspection on a house I didn't own yet, and it found a cracked heat exchanger the seller had no idea about, $2,800 repair that I used to renegotiate the option price down $6,000. The inspection isn't buying you a repair estimate, it's buying you leverage and a reason to walk.

kevin_lombard · Answer

The framing that gets me is cost of inspection versus cost of the repair found, because that's not really the math. The math is cost of inspection versus cost of the thing the inspection didn't find that you then discovered six months in. I'm still on the passive side and haven't closed anything yet, but I've been reading enough postmortems on fourplexes specifically to know that attic moisture from an unvented fan can hide for a year before it shows up as rot in the sheathing, and sheathing replacement on a fourplex in the Inland Empire is running $8,000 to $14,000 right now depending on access. The $190 fix was the cheap version of that story. The cutoff people don't talk about is not a repair dollar amount at all, it's whether the inspector has actually done multifamily before, because a residential guy on a fourplex will miss mechanical and electrical load issues that a commercial-crossover inspector catches in the first hour.

angela_burke · Answer

The math only looks bad in hindsight because you already know the answer. On a fourplex I picked up in San Bernardino two years ago, the inspector found a cracked heat exchanger on one of the furnaces, quoted repair came in at $1,400 but the unit needed full replacement at $3,800. I never would have pushed on that without the report in hand because the furnace was running fine on walkthrough. The inspection doesn't just find the $200 problems, it gives you documentation to negotiate or walk, and on a multifamily the seller doesn't get to shrug off a written report the way they can shrug off your gut feeling. I paid $620 for that one and got $4,500 off the asking price.

Does a $450 inspection make sense when the problem it finds costs $200 to fix

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