Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Independent inspection?

I would like to ask my fellow Ryan Homes bloggers what your thoughts are about getting an independent inspection. My wife and I didn't really think about it until noting that some of you have gone down that route. Is it really worth getting an independent inspection? How much do they typically cost? What point(s) in the building process should such an independent inspection take place? I would love to hear your opinions and any stories that you might have.

7 comments:

  1. YES!!! Get one!! As wonderful as RH is, the homes are still built by men. Men make mistakes. You want to protect your investment!

    I would DEFINITELY get one prior to the pre-dry wall meeting. We did. They found 5 things with our place. Other inspectors have found things too. Usually nothing to major, but things you would want addressed.

    Others have also had the inspector come back at pre-settlement walk-through too.

    I'm not sure of the cost. We have a family member in the business and they helped us out by doing it for free.

    GL!

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  2. I would recommend getting one. Your PM should be checking all the work done but he is in charge of lots of homes in different neighborhoods, so it is nice to have a second (non-biased) set of eyes check everything. We only had an inspection done pre-closing. It was $500 for the waverly (4100 sq feet). The rate should be lower than an existing home but will vary based on size of home. They not only check structural items, but also run all the appliances to make sure they are properly installed.

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  3. There's a local guy who charges $350. Does this seem like a reasonable price?

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  4. We recommend getting your own inspector. However, we ran into problems with RH accepting an outside inspector. Eventually, we work it out, but at first they didn't want anyone on site prior to pre-settlement. Check out our blog for more info. Just make sure that you discuss it with your RH sales rep and PM that you are interested in an outside inspector. Because we waited, we missed the opportunity to have the inspector inspect the foundation; however, we had the inspector there at pre-drywall. Especially because we had 2 custom request that RH was not familiar with and we felt more comfortable with an outsider inspecting the work to make sure it was done correctly. We paid $125 for the pre-drywall inspection and the pre-settlement walk-thru is $300.

    BD provided a good resource - http://www.nahi.org and we also look at this website for information http://www.ashi.org.

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  5. That's great advice. Thank you, everyone.

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  6. We had a pre-dry wall inspection done and will have him come back right before our pre-settlement walkthru. We just paid $299 for the pre-drywall inspection. He didn't seem to focus on the structural as much as I would have liked, but our township inspectors are brutally tough so I am not concerned about that. Most of what our inspector found were cosmetic in nature.

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