Many buyers will conduct a home inspection before they finalize the sale transaction when purchasing a home. Is it worth doing your own inspection before listing so you know what needs to be fixed? Is it better to wait and see what the buyer finds at the start of escrow?
Most sellers wait until they are in escrow, and then they let the buyer schedule a general home inspection and termite inspection. While the seller does save themselves the cost of the inspection itself, they often stand to lose more when they get served with repair requests or credits during escrow.
Pre-listing inspection
If issues come up in your pre-listing home inspection, you have time to get a specialist to come out and provide an estimate or get competitive bids. From there, you may decide on how to move forward.
You can:
Decide to handle the repairs yourself before you list; or
Provide the inspection report to your buyers along with repair cost estimates so they can consider the cost of repairs as they put together their offer.
When you provide these inspection reports and estimates to buyers, you can shrink escrow times, eliminate inspection contingencies, and avoid repair requests.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, the inspections are almost always done prior to reviewing offers, and transactions run more smoothly and quickly. Thus, the price sellers go into escrow at in the Bay Area is the price sellers take home when they close escrow.
In contrast, in other parts of the country where pre-listing inspections are not completed, there are typically buyer inspections and requests for repair while in escrow. Sellers make costly repairs or take purchase price reductions. Sellers can typically avoid such repairs and purchase price reductions by having a pre-listing inspection.