New Construction and New Home Warranty Inspections
New does not mean flawless. It means nothing has had time to go wrong yet — which is a very different claim.
A new house is assembled by dozens of trades working to a schedule, often in weather, often on a site where the next trade arrives before the last one has quite finished. Municipal inspections confirm the building meets code at particular stages. They are not the same as one independent person going through the whole finished house on your behalf, and nobody on the build is being paid to be on your side.
Before you take possession
The walkthrough the builder offers you before handover is a good thing and you should do it. But it is usually an hour, it is led by someone who works for the builder, and it is aimed at deficiencies you can see standing up in a well-lit room.
We do the other version. Three and a half to four hours, over 1,500 points, up in the attic and down in the crawlspace, at the roof and around the grading. What comes back is a written report with photographs — which is a far more useful thing to attach to a deficiency list than a page of handwriting on a clipboard.
The value of doing this before possession is simple: outstanding items are easier to get resolved while the builder still holds something you want.
Before the warranty window closes
New homes in BC built by licensed residential builders come with home warranty insurance, and it is not open-ended. There are separate coverage periods for materials and labour, for the building envelope, and for structural defects, and each one has an end date measured from when you took possession.
Those dates do not announce themselves. People find out about them afterwards, which is the expensive way.
A warranty milestone inspection is booked deliberately in the months before a coverage period ends. We go through the house, document what we find, and give you a written report with photographs — so that a claim, if you make one, is a documented list rather than a recollection. Check your own warranty certificate for your dates, and book far enough ahead that you have time to submit.
New building in the North Okanagan
The north builds differently from the Central Okanagan. There are fewer large subdivisions and more one-off houses — a custom build on an acreage in Coldstream or Spallumcheen, an infill on an older Vernon street, a house going up on a rural parcel outside Lumby or Enderby, a new manufactured or modular home set on land the owner already had.
That changes what is worth a second look.
A first-time system, not a proven one
On an unserviced parcel the well, the pump and the septic field are as new as the house. Nothing has been through a full winter yet.
Site and water
Cut-and-fill lots, benched building sites and long driveways. Grading and drainage on a fresh site is the thing most likely to be unfinished at handover.
Elevation and snow
A house at Silver Star elevation deals with snow load, freeze protection and long stretches of no one being home. Detailing that is fine at valley bottom is not automatically fine up there.
One-off builds, one-off trades
A single custom house does not get the repetition a hundred-unit subdivision gets. Sometimes that means better work. Sometimes it means the one detail nobody had done before.
None of this argues against building new. It argues for having someone look at the finished article before the builder’s involvement ends.
What actually turns up on new builds
Not disasters, usually. The pattern on a new house is small things done in a hurry, in the places nobody looks after the drywall goes up:
- Insulation missing, compressed, or not carried through where two trades met
- Attic ventilation blocked or never connected
- Bathroom and range fans venting into the attic instead of outside
- Flashing and sealing left incomplete at penetrations and transitions
- Grading that sends water towards the foundation rather than away from it
- Plumbing fixtures and connections that were never run properly
- Electrical work that is finished but not finished off
- Doors, windows and hardware that do not sit or seal the way they should
Individually, minor. Left alone behind a warranty deadline, several of them are how water gets into a five-year-old house.
The same inspection, either way
Whether we are there before possession or before a warranty date, it is the standard c4u home inspection: three and a half to four hours, over 1,500 points, a walkthrough with the inspector when we finish, and a written report online with photographs, notations and recommendations.
Come with us if you can. On a new build in particular, you will learn more about your own house in that half hour than in the six months you have owned it.
Full detail on the inspectionWho is doing the inspecting
Vin McConnachie, Consumer Protection BC Home Inspector Licence #78731, Qualified Home Inspector with Carson Dunlop Canada, with a City & Guilds background in electrical engineering and a Higher National Certificate in Building Surveying. Thirty years of looking at how buildings are put together, and where they are usually put together in a hurry.
He works for you, not for the builder.
Questions
Book your new construction inspection
Tell us your possession date or your warranty date, whichever is driving this. We will come back to you within one business day.
We look at your home with our heads so you can look at it with your heart.