Why to check for construction defects before buying an apartment

When buying a used car, it is customary to have a mechanical inspection done, and to check its value in the Levi Yitzhak price guide. When buying a house, an investment many times larger, buyers typically check prices in the area, look at the surroundings, and eyeball the apartment itself: is it freshly painted, in "good" condition, and so on. But what about construction defects, the kind that surface slowly and turn the satisfaction of a new home into distress and repair bills?

You can get a decent read on area prices without much effort, and for something more precise, a real-estate appraiser can give you a formal valuation.

But what about the property's engineering condition?

Construction defects through a professional eye

You can see plaster peeling above the baseboards, but do you know whether the dampness behind it is still active or has already dried out? If it is active, is it a defect you can fix easily, or something that calls for extensive, expensive repair?

Worse: is it coming from the neighbor, setting you up for a confrontation and a headache? Or is this a neighbor nobody can reason with, the very reason the current residents are leaving?

Then there are cracks, the kind no molding can hide. You can see cracks in an exterior wall, but do you know if they come from thermal expansion (nothing to worry about) or from uneven settling of the foundation (very hard to fix, and a real hit to the apartment's value)? You see a railing that looks fine to you. But do you know if it meets the Israeli Standard, or whether it is actually stable?

Unless you work in construction yourself, you almost certainly cannot identify the problem, let alone the fix. A good home inspection engineer checks around 1,000 details in a house. Since there is currently no board or association that unites home inspection engineers under one clear standard, the depth of these inspections varies a lot from one provider to the next.