7 Things to Inspect when Buying a House that Inspectors & Agents Don't

seven things to inspect when buying a house that your inspector your agent may not it's not because they're bad people not because they don't provide tremendous value in your transaction but what we're talking about here is someone outside the scope of what they provide but yet it's so critical that you verify these things you can really make or break the decision of purchasing the home and that's whether you're gonna live in the home or if you're gonna have an investment for a long term period of time especially a vacation rental look if you're doing wholesaling or house flipping some of these things are going to apply but not all of them and this is so important because so often what happens is after you buy the house it's two three four months later you're like oh man I wish I would have known that before the purchase and that's what this is gonna try to help you avoid any of those gotchas and this has come from the school of hard knocks thousands and thousands of house transactions over two decades I have seen an enormous amount in this business and that's why you watch this channel to begin with because you want the signal the truth of what you can only experience through a whole lot of deals and so that's what you're gonna learn right here so let's dive in to these seven things that you need to inspect when buying a house number one is HVAC ducting what you're looking for is mold inside the ducting mold inside the air handling system that can be detrimental the number one cause for mold inside these is is what I would call sizing you don't want to have an air conditioning system that's too big and you don't want it to be too small you wanted to be correctly sized for the load and so a lot of these air conditioning companies out there when they're replacing systems they're not doing load calculations they're just throwing something in there and they may have installed it correctly and it may function correctly but it may bring mold and look this is a big problem right now there's a lot of people out there that are sick because their air conditioning systems have mold inside the ducting now the ducting can be cleaned and there's also other systems that I have on all of my properties whether there's any level of humidity in that geographical area and where I have an ionization machine in there I've got a UV lighting inside the air handling unit that way we there's no way to get any battier in that property not whether it's my own property I'm living in aura tenants that I'm not gonna put them through that either and so this right here this is this is not something that's typically reviewed by an inspector or anyone but what I do to make sure and verify if there's any mold is I will stick my hand inside the ducts where the the vents are like I'll take the vent off and I'll feel around and then of course I'll have an air-conditioning guy come out open up the air-conditioning system the air handling unit and have him look all around to see if there's any mold anywhere those are the two places where mold are gonna collect right before the air comes out of the vents and they're in the air handling system so check this out because if it's the wrong size system what's gonna happen you're gonna have to replace this the entire system to get the right sizing so that you can get rid of that bad air get rid of that mold that's in those ducts and if if you don't do that look it it could be the cause of all kinds of illness and sickness I've dealt with it I've dealt with my own home and living there I'm friends and family and I'll say that they've been sitting there kind of chronically and I'm like did you check your ducts no what are you talking about no get someone to check your AC HVAC ducts get a flashlight in there lo and behold it's full of mold I'm like well there's your problem you've been breathe it in terrible air for years get it fixed alright so that's number one check those HVAC ducts for mold number two inspect the property on a rainy day oh it's a blessing when it's raining when you go to look at a house anytime I go to look at a house and it's pouring down rain I'm like thank you Lord because it tells you so much about what's going on not only of course if there's a roof leak that's obvious but moreover where the water goes where it flows once it hits the ground but it give you a great example this one deal I was looking at it was it's gonna be a home run and I was doing an inspection prior to closing and I saw on the weather that there was gonna be rained in like three days so I told the inspector I want to get it inspected on this date hoping it would rain sure enough it was raining the day he showed up and I got there toward the end and what I noticed was water was flowing from the road down the driveway that was going right into the front yard and it turned out in the width the layout of that house the front yard is also where the septic and the drain field was and what was happening was all that water was just sitting there and it was backing up the system and it was nasty and there really wasn't a great solution that was going to be anything less than about about $15,000 to fix completely kill the deal I would not have noticed that if I would have never looked at the property on a rainy day now look this doesn't apply of course if you're in Las Vegas or Phoenix or something you're in the desert but anywhere else you need to see that property on a rainy day to see where the water flows unless of course we're talking about at the top of a mountain and you know it's flowing down look at the property on a rainy day it can teach you so much about so many things that can damage the property namely water and when water collects and it doesn't flow correctly it can be very expensive to get it to flow correctly number three is flood zones I'm not talking about when the house is in a flood zone because you'll know that especially if it's listed the real estate agent will will disclose that it's when it's not in a flood zone you still want to study where the flood zones are in relation to your property and if you're in the United States you can use the FEMA flood maps I have a link here that's gonna take you to my website where several of the links for today's video are gonna be in there and so FEMA will show you and it'll have the colors of where those flood zones are you want to know where you are in relation to these because even if you're not in one you can still be flooded this is real world this happens a lot more than most people ever imagined I think buying flood insurance in many parts of the country is just such a bargain especially when you're not in a flood zone because this stuff happens these rivers they flood I mean there are just crazy weather events in in 2010 in May in Nashville Tennessee we had a freak 500 year flood where a rain storm just stopped over the city didn't move and just dumped 14 inches of rain in less than a day and a whole lot of damage occurred heck this past week I'm and one of my areas of Florida where I own some property we've had over ten inches of rain in three days and nobody else in the state even got rained out of nowhere and now I spent a lot of money to work on the drainage for that particular property so we're all good the point is you've got to be aware of where flood zones are in relation to yours and you may still want to buy flood insurance and you can do that by verifying with the FEMA flood map where you are in relation to that number four is sinkholes okay so maybe you don't have a sinkhole problem in your area but there's a lot of areas that have experienced sinkholes of course Florida is like the king of them but there's actually a map that you can go to and you can look up sinkholes and see where your house is in relation to those and again I've got that link right up there you can go to that that site and be able to check that out so yeah that would be really awful right so there's several different sinkholes all around this house you buy it unaware and then boom you have a sinkhole problem and once it happens there's no really way to fix it that's like the ultimate awful gotcha so number four verify if there's any sinkholes nearby there were five is sales history now this is truly fascinating to me a lot of times a real estate agent that you're it's helping you buy a house is gonna tell you how much the previous person bought it for when they bought it and all that kind of stuff but I'm talking about going detailed into history and in seen over a long period of time what's happened with that house the tool that I use I have a video on this is prop stream I think it's the absolute greatest tool that's ever come out in the history of real estate investing for allowing you to get research on a house and so yes you can get sales history for some other places but prop stream has so many nice bells and whistles I'll give you a story about sales history so I was looking at this one house that a family member was looking to purchase and it was very odd because I saw her had been listed and then what it had sold for and then five years later would have been listed for what it had sold for and each time it had sold for a lot less than list price and this happened three times in like eight years just was bizarre something was not right about that and it came to find out there is a there's a train track kind of behind the house but through the woods and it was hard to see on satellite because the big oak trees had grown over and so people didn't necessarily realize that there was a train track there and the train would come every three and 6:00 a.m. and it was super loud so these people would buy these houses what I discovered in buy this house loved the house then they just could never sleep because he's stupid train rolling through and so they always did sell it a few years later right so when you see a sales three where the house has been sold a bunch of times you're gonna need to look into why that might be that's peculiar because if the house is awesome if it's a great area it's a place people love they love to live they don't sell very often now again one or two sales is not a big deal it's all of a sudden becomes a pattern so I've studied the sales history that tells me a lot about what's going on it's no different than a car right they have this thing called the CARFAX they're these where you can see and if you've seen where a car has been bought and sold four or five times it's kind of got to be a lemon right because there's a reason why everybody keeps getting rid of it so sales history's been a big thing for me nice a sales history but I mean everything about the background of the house and again that's what props stream can help you with that helps paint a picture of what's really going on that's kind of beyond what you could discover from simply looking at it with your own eyes there's more to the story and oftentimes sales history will teach that number six is what I call varied visits you want to visit the property at varying times now in a perfect world you would have a lot of experience from time of year perspective so that you don't have to necessarily visit it in the spring the summer the fall or winter but I'm talking about different times of day and in different days of the week so that you can start to see if there's some certain things that pop up that nobody would tell you right there there might be on Friday nights the next door neighbor throws a huge bash every Friday night or maybe this is underlain different weather patterns if the wind is blowing in a different direction here's an example of that so I was look at this one property and I was telling a friend of mine and because I had her contract and they said oh I know where that is my friend used to live there freaking hated it I was like oh whoa why do you hate it he said oh because if the wind was coming out of the west it was blowing right across this this trash a processing facility and so it smelled terrible and that whole neighborhood every time the wind came from that direction now the wound wasn't coming from that direction you never know so that's why people would come in and love the house and they'd buy the house and then all of a sudden they get a West win and they're like oh now I see why the person sold it so varying visits it's different wind patterns different times a day morning afternoon evening look I'm not saying that you're gonna take the thing out for a couple of weeks but just vary your visits don't go visit the house three times at the exact same time on a Saturday vary it a little bit that way you can start to get a little bit better in picture what's going on traffic flows and all kinds of other things that you can only notice by being there and in this right here let's just save my rear end so many times and of course I hire assistants now to do this a lot but for me but my goodness varying your visits big big key number seven is to interview the neighbors this is so powerful this is the kind of thing that you can learn no way else you've got to learn it from them and their experiences of living there but you've got to ask the right questions so you knock on your door the door of the neighborhood and do this with several neighbors and say hey look I'm not some creep I'm looking to buy this house here in this neighborhood and I was just hoping to get a little bit of a better idea of what it's like to live here would you be willing to share that with me and then that was oh sure sure come on in and then that way you can say hey look I I think this neighborhood is amazing from what I can tell but I just wonder if there's some things that I wish I would know about before I buy like there are any things that frustrates you about living here and be honest with me I mean it's it's not gonna necessarily change where I buy or not but I would like to know ahead of time and hopefully they'll tell you the real story they'll tell you that if the airplane the airplanes from the the air of airport across town all go right over that neighborhood just because that's the cleanest route in or or maybe there's some creep down the road that's been to jail three times and he's always stealing stuff and causing problems that actually has happened to a friend of mine right now she's literally moving because of this creep oh all right so there are all kinds of reasons why there are hidden problems you could never learn but the neighbors are gonna know and if you're cool by the way they're actually going to really like it as well because chances are they probably don't like the neighbor or the person you're buying the house from and so they're gonna love that you're moving in because you sound fun and cool and all that good stuff so interview neighbors it can teach you things that there's no other way to learn them it's super powerful and here's your bonus number eight HOAs homeowners associations or if it's a condo it's a condo association or for this acronym I refer to it as horrible organizations of a-holes I can't stand associations they're awful and so I actually have a video right here on beware of investing in HOAs or properties that are in there but even if you're buying to live in you need to be very careful and this right now this is a growing growing trend a lot of new developments have associations in them the counties love it it makes it faster for permitting and the developers can sometimes make a residual income after the development is over so this is becoming more and more popular and it is so difficult in so many respects when you're a homeowner to do basic things and it can make it less marketable when you're trying to resell if you ever do try to resell be very aware of the of the dangers of buying an association well thank you so much for watching this video I hope you learned a tremendous amount from this information I shared and if you want to learn even more about real estate investing check out my book how to be a real estate investor I give it away for free in these videos if you've already got this book well done make sure you subscribe to this YouTube channel and set notifications on so you can be made aware anytime I put out something new because as you can see I first of all don't put them out very often and when I do they're incredibly valuable they can be life transforming for you and if you want to be a first class market leading real estate investor consider my apprentice program where my coaching team and I we transform people into money-making machines and we're crushing it right now my people are incredibly successful and you can't be too so check out my apprentice program apply for that and lastly if you haven't already make sure you watch that video on to beware of investing in properties that are in associations all right well I'm Phil I'll be the freedom mentor thanks so much for watching I'll see on the next video

Channel: Phil Pustejovsky

Views: 158,724

Rating: 4.915472 out of 5

Keywords: House Buying, Buying a House, First Time Home Buyer, Home Purchasing, Home Buying, Phil Pustejovsky, Freedom Mentor, Home Inspection, Home Buying Process

Id: veuCqe4d1Eo

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 12 2019