One aspect not mentioned in this article is that when you offer an average price for a home, you are only going to get the owners of below-average homes taking you up on the offer, i.e. the Lemons. This is a tricky problem for Zillow to resolve given the mismatch in knowledge between the existing owner and the iBuyer.
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/08/1053689886/ibuyers-zillow-and...
It might be a poor checklist, but that's another story. I suspect there are good checklists you can download that you can use yourself and give to an inspector who is well meaning but inexperienced.
No list will fix dishonesty however. They can simply check off boxes.
As the sibling post said, most inspectors aren’t using NDT tools to check if there is wood rot behind that fresh coat of paint
If you’re slightly decent with houses and construction, you’d see most of the things they see anyway.
Sadly, I’d place home inspections closer to useless to useful for me because I am familiar enough with housing codes to do a visual inspection.
* No general inspector I have gotten was qualified or willing to touch the roof. If I wanted to look at the roof condition, I needed to pay a roofing company separately to come out.
* The electrical inspection consisted of taking the lid off the electric box, and looking for loose wires, and putting a "does this have ground" meter in all of the power outlets. Most of the interesting electrical issues that could exist are burred in walls and not accessible.
* General inspectors are not HVAC techs, and can't really say much about HVAC beyond "The furnace is 14 years old based on the install sticker, and appears to turn on"
* Structural issues were like.. look for visible cracks in foundation, but much is likely behind drywall and unable to be seen. Maybe put a marble on the floor and see if it rolls.
Assuming the electrical work was done by electricians and not total amateurs, there should be absolutely no issues inside walls/ceilings, every splice or termination must be ‘accessible’, which means in a junction box that is not buried in a wall. If a box is inside a ceiling or wall, an access panel would make it accessible.
Electrical issues are almost always at the point of termination, unless you have animals chewing on your romex insulation. Bad splices and terminations cause arcs, which cause fires, which is why AFCI breakers are now mandatory for almost (unsure if it’s all or not, I work on the commercial side) every receptacle circuit inside a residence. Aluminum wiring caused fires because aluminum expands and contracts with heat faster than the terminal screws that were used in the wiring devices of the time. Now we have AL-CU devices that eliminate this problem.
You can’t always count of electrical work being done properly though.
Obviously they can't see hidden problems but the really bad stuff (cracked foundation with seepage issues, water damage, mold, etc) is worth looking into. My inspector pointed out a number of things like old cast iron plumbing, some unidentified venting, electrical that wasn't to code, insufficient ventilation to the attic, etc.
It didn't affect the price but it did give me a good checklist for what to fix in what order.
I’m looking at starting a campaign to force mega rental companies to get home inspections and provide results to tenants.
A large apartment building with a known history is very different then random houses where incompetent people did who knows what to the internals.
Sounds like I may need to push more then a standard home inspection.
Why would someone want to sell a home fast? Generally due to a relocation urgency or financial challenge. If it’s financial, there is a decent likelihood that proper care and maintenance may have been missed and that could lead to a lipstick on a pig kind of situation.
Zillow can have better information on the market value of a house that it has worse access to information about than the owner.