Pre-Listing and Seller's Inspection
Your house is going to get inspected. The only question is whether it happens now, while you are in control of what you do about it, or in three weeks, in front of a buyer who has just found a reason to ask for money back.
A pre-listing inspection is the same full inspection a buyer would order — three and a half to four hours, over 1,500 points, a walkthrough and a written report — run before the sign goes up, for you instead of against you.
Price it like you know what you’re selling
Most sellers price on comparables and a guess about condition. A pre-listing inspection replaces the guess. If the roof has years left in it and the furnace was serviced last autumn, that is worth knowing before you set a number — and worth saying out loud in the listing.
If something is at the end of its life, that is worth knowing too. Better to price it in deliberately than to have it priced in for you, later, by someone else’s inspector.
An ounce of prevention
The expensive version of a defect is not the repair. It is who is holding the clock when it turns up.
Found before you list, a defect is a job you schedule. You get quotes, you choose the trade, you pick the week, and you decide whether it is worth doing at all.
Found by a buyer’s inspector, the same defect stops being a repair and becomes a concession. It is now negotiated against a subject-removal deadline, with someone who has just started wondering what else has not been mentioned, and whose alternative is to walk. At that point you are not settling the cost of the work. You are settling what it takes to keep the deal alive — and that is almost always the larger number.
Find it first and it stays a repair.
What a buyer’s inspector will look at hardest in the north
If your house is in Vernon, Coldstream, Armstrong, Enderby or Lumby, there is a good chance it predates 2000 and a fair chance it is not on city services. Those are the findings that reopen prices here.
The wiring
Original and part-replaced circuits in the same house, and a panel of a certain vintage. This is the single most common reason a buyer's financing or insurance turns into a problem.
The roof
Age, second coverings, and how it has handled the snow load. Buyers reprice roofs harder than anything else on the list.
The wood stove
Where it is the main heat, its installation, clearances and chimney will be looked at closely, and your buyer's insurer will ask about it.
Water and waste
A well and a septic field will get their own specialists. Have whatever service records you hold ready — a seller who can produce them is in a different position from one who cannot.
What you built along the way
Additions, decks, shops, barns and suites that arrived over the years. If it was permitted, find the paperwork now. If it was not, you would rather know that before a buyer's inspector says so.
Drainage and access
Benched and hillside lots, retaining, and a long driveway that has to work in February.
A newer or serviced home is a shorter list, and you will hear that from us just as plainly.
Fix what matters. Ignore the rest.
You do not need to fix everything on the report, and you should not try. Most of it is normal wear that any inspector would note on any house of that age.
What the report lets you do is separate three piles:
We will walk the property with you when the inspection is done and tell you which pile each finding belongs in.
Client story: the roof that was costing a sale
A seller came to c4u because their house was not selling, and the feedback kept coming back to the same thing: the look of the roof. Buyers were assuming the worst and adjusting their offers accordingly. c4u carried out a roof pre-inspection and gave the sellers a fair, documented assessment of what the roof was actually in — which was something they could hand to buyers instead of leaving them to guess.
What you get, and what you do with it
The same deliverable as any c4u home inspection: a walkthrough with the inspector on the day, then a written report online with photographs, notations and recommendations.
What sellers do with it varies. Some fix the short list and say nothing. Some hand the whole report to their realtor to use as a selling document — a house with a recent independent inspection on the table reads as a house with nothing to hide. Talk to your realtor about which approach suits your listing, and about what you are required to disclose in BC. That part is their advice to give, not ours.
Who is inspecting your house
Vin McConnachie, Consumer Protection BC Home Inspector Licence #78731, Qualified Home Inspector with Carson Dunlop Canada, thirty years of property inspection in the UK and Canada. He has been working the Okanagan since 2005, which is long enough to know how houses of every local vintage tend to age.
Worth saying: he will not tell you what you want to hear. That is precisely the value. A report that goes easy on your house is a report the buyer’s inspector will contradict in three weeks.
Book before you list
Tell us when you are hoping to go to market and we will work back from it. We will come back to you within one business day.
Looks can be deceiving, let c4u see for you.