Home Inspections:  Why a Seller Should Have a Home Inspection Prior to Marketing

We highly recommend that our sellers get a home inspection "to prepare the property for marketing." Those words are actually used by us as the opening to our Marketing Remarks in the MLS listing so that buyers know that the seller has done his/her due diligence. In addition, this technique is done almost exclusively by Ault & Associates in our listings. Other agents ask us how we get our sellers to do this and wish they could do the same. We tell them that we believe in it 100%. The result is two-fold: 1.) Other agents in the MLS know that when they bring a buyer to our listings, there will be no surprises. Too many sales fall out of escrow during the inspection process because of surprises. And, 2.) The Seller usually gets a better price to begin with since the buyer has nowhere to go with his offer; he can no longer come in low because he believes that the roof may be bad or the heating and cooling are unknowns in this older home. Those questions have been answered by the home inspection report which becomes part of the seller's disclosure items along with receipts for work performed.