When you are in the market for a new house, the first thing you tend to do once you find a new home you like, is to get the new 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 largely wrong with the house, either the bank won’t lend the money or the potential customer will back out of the purchase. Well, when I was looking for a new home, I fell in love with an older model brick site in an established village. It was at the top of my price range, so I couldn’t afford anything too dramatic to be wrong with it. The new home inspector went in and got to task looking in every nook and corner for what might need to be fixed or upgraded. This new home had only minor things. The roof was good and relatively new. The warm water heater was one of the newer kinds that provides heating on demand. There were no obvious cracks that would indicate foundation concerns. There was just a single thing I was distraught about. The HVAC unit. The inspector proposed that the cooling system and gas furnace entirely didn’t have much longer to live. He estimated that I would need to upgrade the HVAC system within one year of buying the house. Well, the HVAC unit is usually the 2nd most expensive thing to upgrade in a home, 2nd only to the roof, so that entirely made me worry. Then I found out the cooling system worked fine, but he just had a formula that said replacing the cooling system usually needed to happen every 12 years, and this HVAC component was 11 years old. I purchased the house anyway.