4ish years ago when I bought a house I was convinced not to get a house inspection, would it be crazy to get one now just to make sure it's all good?

ericbomb@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 133 points –

Was 25 and super nervous, so when the realtor was like "oh yeah they just check for basic stuff, but I looked around and it looks great" I was like "Oh okay, this is so astronomically expensive every penny saved is good..."

Everything has been great as far as I can tell. House was built like 40 years ago but super well maintained it seemed and I've been super happy. But just curious if maybe I should hire someone to make sure there was nothing outstanding from back then, and no major issues have popped up in the last couple years like leaks/foundation issues, the like.

Is that crazy? Is it weird to call and be like "I'm not selling, I just wanna make sure there are no issues I need to address before they get worse"

Is there a certain type of inspector I should get? I know some inspectors are notoriously lazy.

Also I moved in 2 weeks before covid lock downs happened for time line stuff.

77

You are viewing a single comment

It's not crazy. You should get one every so often just in case. Better to find a small problem now than a big problem later.

I'm more shocked that you could buy the house without an inspection. My bank required one to give me a loan.

Lol yeah surprised inspection wasn't required.

"Realtor said it's cool" would be a red flag to most financial institutions and buyers. Like, now I'm suspicious as hell that OP got sold a lemon and just hadn't realized it yet.

Well even the land itself is worth more than I paid, and 5 years of no problems is a great start. But will find a good inspector and see if I really did get that lucky!

Is the land actually worth more than the property or were you just told that? Because if that was actually true then the sensible thing would have been for a developer to have bought the property to demolish it.

If a property is on expensive land then the value of the property goes up. So I would be highly suspicious of that claim.

The land it's on is "currently" more expensive than what I paid for it 5 years ago. Just recently got an appraisal done.

If I tried to buy this house now with my income the bank would laugh at me.

Sorry to anyone who didn't buy a house pre - covid :(

Totally. Our house is worth almost double what we paid for it before the pandemic. And during one of the lockdowns, we refinanced to a 15-year mortgage at the same monthly payment as our 30-year had been. All of which means that if we were trying to buy this year, we'd be paying four times as much over the span of the loan.

Golden handcuffs, though. We can't move for the next ten years now. Thankfully we don't want to.

What? Refinancing means you have to stay at the home and can't sell?

Not at all. We're free to move whenever we like, legally. There's nothing in the contract that says we can't. But if we did, any mortgage we'd get wouldn't have our current (really good) interest rate, and we'd have to pay post-2021 home prices for wherever we'd move to. Like I said, we'd end up paying four times as much over the span of the loan for an equivalently-priced home.

Which is a choice that we could make. But absent a really good reason to move that would offset that massive financial incentive to stay, we're stuck here until we pay it off unless we're willing to take that huge financial hit.