When you are in the market for a new house, the first thing you tend to do once you find a house you like, is to get the home inspected.
Home inspectors are supposed to be looking out for the well-being of the homeowner and the bank that is providing the mortgage.
If there is anything too substantially wrong with the house, either the bank won’t lend the money or the potential buyer will back out of the purchase. Well, when I was looking for a new home, I fell in love with an older model brick place in an established neighborhood. It was at the top of my price range, so I couldn’t afford anything too dramatic to be wrong with it. The home inspector went in and got to work looking in every nook and corner for what might need to be fixed or replaced. This house had only minor things. The roof was fine and relatively new. The hot water heater was one of the newer kinds that provides heating on demand. There were no obvious cracks that would indicate foundation problems. There was just one thing I was worried about. The HVAC. The inspector suggested that the a/c and furnace probably didn’t have much longer to live. He estimated that I would need to replace the HVAC within two years of buying the house. Well, the HVAC is usually the second most expensive thing to replace in a home, second only to the roof, so that really made me worry. Then I found out the a/c worked fine, but he just had a formula that said replacing the a/c usually needed to happen every 12 years, and this HVAc unit was ten years old. I’m not so worried, so I bought the house.