The first inspection report a buyer reads is usually alarming, and usually should not be. Texas inspectors work from a standard form, photograph everything, and document minor items alongside serious ones. A perfectly sound house routinely generates forty pages. The skill is knowing which handful of items are the report.
How to read the report
Sort everything into four groups and the document becomes manageable.
- Structural. Foundation, framing, roof structure. Expensive, and the reason to keep looking if it is bad enough.
- Systems. Electrical, plumbing, HVAC, water heater. Finite lives and knowable replacement costs. What matters is age and condition, so you can budget rather than be surprised.
- Safety. Exposed wiring, missing GFCI protection near water, gas issues, non-functioning smoke alarms. Usually cheap and always worth fixing.
- Cosmetic and maintenance. Everything else, which is most of the pages. A sticking door and a cracked switch plate are not negotiating positions.
If a buyer comes back to a seller with forty items, the seller reads it as an attempt to renegotiate the price and tends to dig in. Five real items get a serious response.
What is specific to Central Texas
Foundation movement. The expansive clay soils across much of this area swell when wet and shrink when dry, and slab foundations move with them. Some movement is normal and nearly universal in older houses here. The question is whether it is within a normal range or progressing, and a general inspector will flag it without answering that. A structural engineer answers it, and it is money well spent on any house showing signs.
Drainage and grading. Related to the above and cheaper to fix. Central Texas rain arrives all at once. Where water sits against a slab, or downspouts discharge next to the foundation, you have both a foundation problem and a future one.
Trees close to the house. Beautiful, valuable, and drawing moisture out of the soil near the foundation during a dry summer. Not a reason to avoid a house, and a reason to look at what is directly beside the slab.
HVAC capacity and age. Cooling load here is serious and the system works hard for months. Age plates matter, and a unit at the end of its life is a real number rather than a footnote.
Roof and hail. Storms across this region damage roofs regularly, and roof age drives insurance premiums as much as it drives the risk of a leak. Ask when it was last replaced and whether a claim was made.
Older cast iron drain lines. In central neighborhoods with houses from the mid-century, the drain lines under the slab can be at the end of their life. A sewer camera is inexpensive relative to what it can find.
Order the specialists
A general inspection is a broad survey by a generalist, and the standard form limits what they are required to evaluate. On a house where the general report raises something, or where the house is old enough to warrant it, order the specialist while your option period is still running.
The ones we most often recommend here: a structural engineer where there is any foundation question, a sewer camera on older central houses, a dedicated roof assessment where the roof is at all aged, and separate septic and well inspections on anything outside the city utility system.
Timing is the whole game
All of this has to happen inside the option period, which is the negotiated window during which you can terminate for any reason and recover your earnest money. The sequence takes longer than buyers plan for: book the general inspection, read the report, order specialists, get bids, then decide.
Book the general inspector before the contract is executed if you can. Good ones are booked out, and days spent waiting for an appointment are days off your window. The mechanics are in the option period explained.
In the current market, with roughly 5.9 months of inventory and homes averaging around 68 days on market, there is generally room to negotiate a period long enough to do this properly rather than the shortest one a seller will accept.
Negotiating afterwards
Take a credit or a price reduction rather than asking the seller to perform the work, in most cases. A seller who is leaving has every incentive to fix things to the minimum acceptable standard with whichever contractor can come before closing. A credit means you choose the contractor, the standard, and the timing, after you own the house.
The exception is anything a lender or insurer requires to be resolved before closing, which has to be done regardless of who would rather do it.
What we do about it
We book inspections early, attend where we can, and go through the report with you separating the five items that matter from the thirty-five that do not. Where the report raises a foundation question we will tell you to get an engineer rather than guessing, and if the answer is that the house is not worth it, we would rather say that inside the option period.