The guideActively looking4 min read
What to look for at an inspection
Twenty minutes in someone else's house, with an agent watching. What to check, what the polite phrases mean, and why the second visit matters more.
By Paddy Carroll · Founder, HomePlanner
An open inspection is a sales environment dressed as a viewing. It is twenty minutes long, staged, usually held at the best hour of the day, and hosted by somebody the vendor pays. None of that makes it dishonest. It does mean the frame is not yours, and the way to get value from it is to arrive with your own.
Before you go
- Read the listing for what it avoids. Photographs taken from one corner, no floorplan, no mention of the year built, a shot of the park instead of the street. Absence is the cheapest signal you get.
- Look up what sold nearby. Three or four comparable sales in the last six months tells you whether the price guide is real. Agents expect you to know this; most buyers don't.
- Get the strata report early if it's a unit or townhouse. It takes days to arrive and it is the single most useful document in the purchase. Ordering it after you've fallen for the place is the wrong order.
- Look at the street on a map, then in person. Main road, flight path, train line, the pub's smoking area. A satellite view finds in thirty seconds what a Saturday morning hides.
The twenty minutes
Work in a fixed order every time. Not because it is thorough — twenty minutes cannot be thorough — but because the same order at every property is what makes ten properties comparable afterwards.
Structure
Cracking, especially stepped cracks in brickwork or anything you could fit a coin into. Doors and windows that stick or won't latch. A floor that isn't level — put something round on it. Rooflines that sag.
Water
The most expensive thing you can miss. Bubbling paint, a tidemark low on a wall, fresh paint in one small area, the smell in a built-in wardrobe. Look under sinks and inside the vanity, not just at them.
Services
Open the switchboard: ceramic fuses mean an old installation. Age of the hot water system, usually printed on it. Water pressure in the shower. Whether the place actually has heating and cooling or just a plan for it.
Light and aspect
Which way the living areas face, checked on your phone's compass rather than taken on trust. North in Australia is the one you want. A dark room at 11am on a clear Saturday does not get better.
Noise and neighbours
Stand still and stop talking for thirty seconds. Traffic, trains, the neighbour's air conditioner, a dog. Look at what overlooks the bedroom windows and what is likely to be built on the empty block behind.
Life, not layout
Where wet coats and shoes go. Whether two people can be in the kitchen. Where a washing machine fits and where washing dries. Bin storage. These are the things that wear you down, and no photograph shows them.
What the agent is actually saying
Agents rarely lie; they are legally constrained and professionally careful. They do choose their words. Guess what each of these means before you open it.
“There's been a lot of interest.”
Sometimes true, and unfalsifiable either way. It costs the agent nothing to say and is designed to shorten your thinking. The useful reply is a question with a checkable answer: how many contracts have been requested? That one they will usually answer straight, and it is a real number.
“The vendor is motivated.”
Usually means the vendor has already bought somewhere else and is carrying two commitments, or the property has been passed in. It is genuinely good news for you. Ask how long it has been on the market and whether it has been listed before — both are public and both are leverage.
“It's priced to sell.”
Says nothing about value, only about the guide. In some states the guide is legally required to be reasonable; in practice underquoting persists because it fills open homes. Trust comparable sales, not the guide.
“That's just cosmetic.”
It might be. Cosmetic is also what movement cracking, rising damp and a failed shower membrane look like from four feet away in good light. This is the exact sentence a building inspection exists to test, and hearing it should make you more likely to pay for one, not less.
Go back
The single highest-value thing in this chapter: see the place twice, at different times. Saturday at 11am is chosen for you. A Wednesday evening or a Sunday afternoon is chosen by you, and it is where the traffic, the noise, the light and the neighbours show up.
What checking properly costs
Due diligence is the part people skip, and the reason they skip it is that it is money spent on a property you might not get. That is a real cost and worth seeing plainly.
Checking one apartment properly, before you make an offer.
- Combined building and pest inspection$750 to $1,000 or more for a larger or unusual property
- $550
- Strata inspection reportUnits and townhouses. The admin and sinking funds, and three to five years of minutes
- $400
- Before you have the keys
- $950
Ten properties, six weekends
The real failure mode isn't missing a crack. It is standing in the seventh place and genuinely not remembering whether it was the fourth or the fifth that had the good kitchen and the bad bathroom. Photographs don't fix it, because by Sunday night you have four hundred of them and no idea which house is which.
So take the same notes, in the same order, every time — the six headings above work. Score them, even roughly. A comparison you can actually read on Sunday night is worth more than a perfect memory of one property and a blur of the rest.
Do this in HomePlannerInspection tracker The same checklist at every open, saved against each property, so the seventh inspection is comparable with the first instead of replacing it.Free account requiredBefore you move on
- You inspect in the same order every time
- You've seen your shortlist at a second, different time of day
- You've checked comparable sales rather than trusting the price guide
- You've ordered the strata report before making an offer, not after
- You've budgeted for building and pest on more than one property