Skipped the inspection because I've swung a hammer for fifteen years. $14,300.

Cosmetic flip, 1,340 square foot ranch, built 1961. I walked it twice, wrote a scope, and waived the inspection to win against two other offers. I frame, I tile, I've torn out more bathrooms than I can count, and I genuinely believed I could see everything that mattered.

Two things I couldn't see. The sewer lateral had a belly and root intrusion about 30 feet out, which showed up when the tub backed up on day nine of demo. Camera, dig, spot repair, $8,900. And the panel was a 100 amp with no room and a double-tapped breaker feeding the kitchen, which my electrician wouldn't touch without a service upgrade to sell the house clean. $5,400.

A general inspection plus a sewer scope in my market runs about $650 together. Neither of those items was hidden from a camera or from a guy with a meter. They were hidden from me because I was looking at finishes and thinking about my scope.

What I'd do differently. Sewer scope every single house older than 1970, no exceptions, and it goes in the budget as a line item before I ever write an offer. And if I'm waiving to win, I'd rather pay for an information-only inspection so I keep the walk-away instead of buying blind. Being a builder made me overconfident about exactly the two systems I can't see.

Answer

2stephen_ok9CO2CPRO6

The thing I'd separate out for anyone reading this as their first flip: a general home inspection and the specialist scopes are different products, and the general one is mostly visual.

A general inspector walks the house and reports on what he can see and operate. Standards of practice vary by the association and by state licensing, but broadly he isn't putting a camera down your sewer line, isn't pulling the furnace apart, and isn't opening walls. So the report very often ends with "recommend evaluation by a licensed plumber" on exactly the thing that later costs you five figures.

Which means the $650 harrow is describing isn't one purchase. It's a $450ish general inspection plus a $200ish sewer scope, and on older houses people add a separate electrical or HVAC evaluation. Budget the bundle. The general report is what tells you which specialists to call, and if you're on a short clock you order the obvious ones in parallel rather than waiting on it.

harrow's $8,900 is the ordinary number for that repair, not a bad-luck number. That's the part worth internalizing.

3 replies

1aliyah_bAU2APRO6

I'm building the cost sheet for a first deal right now and inspections were sitting at one line for $400. Moving to four lines: general, sewer, and two placeholders for whatever the general report kicks out. Thanks for the expensive version of that lesson.

Did the 100 amp panel actually hurt resale or was that your electrician being conservative?

1Rena Expert

On tally's question, whether a 100 amp service hurts resale depends on the buyer's lender and appraiser, and on what the house needs to run. The mechanism that matters more is the double-tapped breaker. Once an inspector writes that up on the resale side, it becomes a bargaining item on a house you're trying to sell clean, and you're negotiating from the seller's chair with a report in the buyer's hand. Confirm any specific electrical requirement with your local building department, since amendments to code adoption vary by jurisdiction.

The general point in this thread is the split between the general inspection and ancillary services. Sewer scoping, radon, thermal imaging, pool and septic evaluations, and increasingly verification of smart-home devices are usually priced separately, and some of them sit outside what standards of practice require an inspector to test at all. That last part matters for anyone buying a house full of connected thermostats and cameras. If it isn't in the scope, absence from the report isn't a clean bill of health, it's silence.

The assumption harrow's revised plan depends on is availability. Ordering specialists in parallel on a short window only works where those trades will show up inside a week. In markets where the sewer camera is booked out ten days, the answer changes to negotiating a longer diligence period up front, and that costs you something on offer strength.