How $500 can save you $30,000. Why you should get a home inspection.

Many purchasers of homes decide to forgo the optional home inspection in some cases. They have a tough time trying to decipher why they would shell out anywhere between $450-$800 for a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ to come into their potential new home and tell them things they think they already know. If you fit into this category, STOP and give your head a serious shake.

Like a general practitioner doctor, a home inspector may not know a ton about one particular subject of a house, yet they do know a little bit (or more) about a lot. A good home inspector will use all the latest and greatest tools to inspect your home and should give you a full written report for you to take home at the end. They don’t need to know exactly where that leak is coming from, but they sure can point you in a better direction to figure it out than anyone else.

So why put out the expense? A familiar case sample from numbers of happy clients I have helped in the past, including a story of my own. When I set out to buy my first home, I was excited. It is such a cool experience to go house shopping and even better to imagine all of the amazing ideas, memories and plans you could experience in that new home. After a few weeks of shopping, I had decided on a 2 storey basement entry in North Delta.

The home needed some work, I could see that, and being a relatively handy guy with a good eye for what needed to be done, I wrote my offer accordingly. Now, I realize the importance of a good home inspector so as part of my conditions, I made sure to give myself some time to get my inspector into the house.

When working with clients, I have no emotion invested into what they buy and this allows me to be very unbiased. I can see many things that they typically cannot, due to the large amounts of homes I see every week and also from what I have learned from my home inspector in the past. The challenge is when emotion and excitement get involved, that trained eye can get cloudy. This was also the case for my own almost first home. I was excited and thinking more like a buyer than a Realtor.

My home inspection lasted over 3 hours and my inspector took his time to ensure he got everything I needed to know. At the end of the inspection, together we went through the list of things that needed to be done and the even bigger list of things that the average eye would not see.

There was over $30,000 worth of immediate work that was important to the life of the home that needed to be dealt with asap. This included unsafe electrical, huge drainage issues, sloppy previous home owner renovations, and more. Having a great relationship with my inspector, he jokingly remarked to me, “You need to run away from this house!”

That day was great to cement the lesson into my head that a home inspection is critical. I, nor most other Realtors, do not have a construction/electrical/plumbing/general home construction backgrounds so we cannot catch everything either. By investing around $500 in a 3.5 hour inspection, I saved myself from making a $30,000 mistake.

The moral of the story, get the home inspected everytime before you buy. You never know what yo may discover later if not. As for me, I am in a different home, with much less work to take care of. I get to save my money for bigger and better things!

Good luck out there!

Darin

The 3 most commonly misunderstood media driven real estate statistics

The media, in an attempt to feed the public's insatiable appetite for real estate news, often publishes interesting pieces of real estate information that help sell papers. Due to constant heavy dose of statistical information, it's important to understand how the data is collected and how to interpret these facts.

Below are the 3 most commonly misunderstood real estate statistics in the media:

1) Pace of Canadian Housing Starts Up

http://globalnews.ca/news/627941/pace-of-canadian-housing-starts-up-in-may/

This shouldn't really matter to buyers or sellers out there. While this is related to the real estate market, it is more relevant for the construction industry than it is to the resale housing market.

Remember, these are new home construction figures: not sales or pricing numbers. Unless you're a construction worker or materials' supplier, this type of information is largely irrelevant to your real estate decision-making process.

2) Home Sales Drop!

http://business.financialpost.com/2013/04/03/toronto-vancouver-home-sales-fall-sharply-in-march/?__lsa=ca1a-ee8a

This kind of information is important for buyers and sellers to know and also helpful for realtors to use. A drop in home sales is sometimes a precursor to lower prices down the road. That said, there are a multitude of reasons that home sales could slow that wouldn't also result in a corresponding drop in prices.

It is therefore important to remember that these are unit sale figures, not price figures. These statistics also generally need to be seasonally adjusted to reflect the fact that sales tend to be slower in the winter and summer as opposed to the spring and fall. You should talk to a professional to see whether a drop in sales velocity is because of a slowing market or because of some other extraneous event.

3) Average House Prices Rise 6.5%!

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2011/10/17/crea-housing-september.html

This is the most misunderstood of the media reports that come out because averages are a terrible metric to measure house prices.

This is because the type of home that is sold in a given month strongly influences the outcome. For instance, if a lot of luxury homes are sold one month, then the average price of homes will go up, even if the typical home price doesn't change. This is exactly what has already happened in Vancouver, where the average price has risen 5.4% year over year, but the typical home price has fallen (see graph below).

For a more complete analysis of these statistics, please feel free to contact me at the email address or phone number above.