How Much Does A Home Inspection Cost?

If you are in a hurry, please call me at CELL # 859-797-3873 or CELL# 502-570-4054 with as much of the information about the house as you have handy to obtain the B4U Close cost of your home inspection.  If you have a few minutes, I suggest you read the entire page about Home Inspection Pricing differences.

The cost of a B4U Close home inspection varies based on the following information:

· Size of the house

· Age of the House

· Foundation type: Crawl Space, Basement, or slab

· Number of bathrooms

· Number of Air Conditioning/Heating Systems

· Type of garage

· Outbuildings or recreational facilities included or not included in the inspection.

· As we service a large area, the distance we have to travel to get to the property may also play into the cost.

Please call me at CELL # 859-797-3873 or CELL# 502-570-4054!

Or Have Me Call You!! 

Additional Kentucky Home Inspection Pricing information.

So you’re spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a home purchase, and paying the realtors 5 - 6% ($5,000 - $6,000 per $100,000) of the home’s value. (Where do you think the seller gets the money to pay the realtors?)  Now it’s time to find a Home Inspector and find out what they are going to charge.

No matter how much you pay for a Snickers Candy Bar or, where you buy it, you still get a Snickers Candy Bar.  Same quality.  Same taste.  Same appearance.

That maxim does not hold true when buying an opinion.  And face facts, a Home Inspection is just the Home Inspector’s opinion (and the Inspector’s ability to communicate that opinion) of a particular house.  Hopefully it’s an expert opinion based on knowledge, education, training, experience, and ability to communicate, but still just an opinion.

If a $25 or $50 difference in the price of the Home Inspector’s opinion is more important to you than what the opinion is based on (knowledge, education, training, experience, ability to communicate, type of report received, etc) and how much money that opinion can save you, (YES, SAVE YOU), then stop reading after this paragraph.  Go to the Yellow Pages, look under Home Inspections, and call each one asking just one question.  “How much do you charge?”  Don’t waste your time asking any other questions or listening to the Inspector explain the level of service.  Just go until you get all through and then select the cheapest.  To my knowledge, in Central Kentucky, it’s about $175.

Just remember, "The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten." (Author unknown)

If you DON’T want the cheapest, least experienced, desperate for work, inspector, read further.

Can you trust your realtor’s recommendations?  Usually yes, if they give you a list with eight to ten or more Inspector’s on it instead of just two or three names.  Just remember, they don’t get paid if you don’t buy the house.  I note the following real life experiences.

#1.         I recently had a client who, after asking several questions, told me, “I really feel I need an inspection.  My realtor emphasized several times that the house had just been remodeled so she didn’t think I needed an inspection, but then she wanted me to sign a form saying that she recommended an inspection.  I just don’t get it.”  There was over $1,000.00 in defects noted during the inspection.

#2.         I’d been trying to get a particular realtor to put my company’s name on his list of Inspectors for over three years.  He finally called wanting me to do an inspection for one of his clients.  Who was the client?  His son!

What should be more important to you than a $50 or $100 difference in price is what the Home Inspector bases the opinion on and how they communicate their opinion to you, the client.

The following questions regarding qualifications & cost apply.

My answers to these questions can be found at

 B4U Close Home Inspector Qualifications. 

What kind of report do you provide and when is it delivered?

What is your background?

What is your Training and Continuing Education:

Do you belong to any Professional Associations?

Does the Inspector offer any “Guarantees”:

Does the inspector pay a referral fee to whoever referred you to them?

Does the inspector get paid a referral fee from or have a financial interest in the contractors he recommends?

Will the inspector offer to fix any of the problems found?

If the inspector offers other services, are they truly qualified to do so?

Now it’s time to ask, How Much Do You Charge?

What kind of report do you provide and when is it delivered?

While other issues are equally important, the easiest way to cut to the chase is to ask for a copy of the Home Inspector's completed Sample Report.  Any inspector can buy a nice looking form or booklet.  You want to see a completed sample report.

Do you want this delivered on site checklist report the cheapest inspector’s use?

Or would you prefer a typed narrative report with a digital photo album.

What is your background?

This is the area that more Home Inspector's disagree on than any other area.  Truth is there is no one particular set of experiences that adequately covers ALL of the system's in and around the home, how they work together, and how they age together.  Once a person decides to become a Home Inspector, they must do a lot of learning and studying on systems outside their particular area of expertise.  Look for continuing education in several different areas of a home's systems.  It's more important than any one set of background experience.

Some people with these experiences think their experience is best for being a Home Inspector. My thoughts:

Engineers:

There are many classifications of engineers. (I’ve inspected houses for several of them) Electrical, Civil, Structural, Mechanical, Marine, Transportation, Sanitary, Highway and Geological are just a few of the classifications.  Ask them what their specialty is and ask them to put their Professional Engineer's stamp on the line for the Home Inspection.  Few will because their engineering specialty has little to do with residential inspection outside their specialty.  Yet some market themselves as better qualified than any other person, because they are an "Engineer".

"Yes, I had my home inspection done by a Structural Engineer.  I had to replace the furnace, the plumbing flooded the basement, and an electrical fire burned down the garage, but dang, that ridge beam is in fine condition."

Former Home Builder's:

Well, Home Builders usually coordinate all the sub-contractors that actually build homes but how much actual building and installing does a home builder do.  After the house is built, the builder moves on to build other houses.  They don't often stick around to see how the house ages. They seldom see the house again after the first year, unless they get sued for crappy construction.

Former Municipal Code Inspectors:

Yes, they do (or should) know the MINIMUM standards for their area of inspection expertise.  But what does an electrical code inspector know about plumbing or heating or air conditioning systems.

Nothing is wrong with any of these or other specialties becoming Home Inspectors.  But don't look to heavy at the past experience.  A far better gauge is to rely on continuing education in several different areas of the home's systems since becoming a Home Inspector.

What is your Training and Continuing Education:

Inspection standards, construction standards, safety standards, generally accepted building practices and other issues change all the time.  Is the Inspector making an effort to stay educated.  Or are they just ignoring the new and continuing with the old.

Do you belong to any Professional Associations:

Some Home Inspectors don't believe in belonging to (as one inspector puts it) "all them dang associations".  Legitimate professional Home Inspector's associate with other legitimate professional Home Inspectors (the same way other professionals associate with their peer professionals).  These organizations provide training and continuing education for the professional Home Inspector along with a forum for their Home Inspectors to stay current with recent advances in the industry.  They also provide a meaningful code of ethics and a standard of practice to guide the inspector.

The four, most pertinent to Kentucky, legitimate Real Estate Associations are:

Kentucky Real Estate Inspection Association (KREIA)     
National Association of Certified Home Inspectors           
American Society of Home Inspectors (ASHI)                   
National Association of Home Inspectors (NAHI)              

There are other state home inspector associations that are equally valid for their state.

Other organizations exist, but the four above are based on a goal of bettering the home inspection industry.  Some home inspection organizations merely exist as a for-profit certification mill for a school (attend our training and you can call yourself a certified home inspector or a registered home inspector.)  It is now very simple to do an internet search on the various organizations and determine the membership requirements.

Does the Inspector offer any “Guarantees”:

A "good" marketing tool for the inspector, but they are seldom useful to the client.