Home inspection for real estate

Real estate deals in Israel are generally seen as profitable and safe, even though the local market sits in something of a price bubble driven by high demand and a thin supply of apartments. A real estate deal does not have to mean buying several properties: for many people it means a single apartment, bought once in a lifetime.

Either way, these are transactions involving large sums, which makes the risk especially high, whether the buyer is someone who regularly invests in property or an individual buying a home for their family.

Succeeding in a real estate deal starts with examining the property before you buy it. Here is how a home inspection company (bedek bayit) can help you evaluate a property before purchase, and significantly improve your odds of a good outcome.

Building inspection from a home inspection company

So what exactly do you get when you turn to a home inspection company before a real estate purchase? These companies employ professionals across the range of fields tied to construction and infrastructure.

A home inspection engineer is trained to examine a property in depth and find the faults that could affect its condition and safety before you move in, whether for living in it or any other purpose, catching what an untrained eye would miss.

Do not let appearances fool you: even a home that looks completely sound, including one recently renovated, can hide plenty of faults that leave you with no choice but to spend many hours and a great deal of money putting it right.

Sewage and water pipe faults, for example, cannot be spotted without professional knowledge, which is exactly why you need a home inspection company to find them. There is nothing worse than discovering pipe faults after buying the apartment: you often then need to vacate it for the repair work, and the repairs themselves can be costly.

So a home inspection company can uncover the faults hidden from view, but how does that affect the price? Once the inspection on the apartment you plan to buy is done, you can bring its findings to the seller and lay out the faults found.

If the seller can fix them himself, so much the better, since you will not have to deal with the repairs yourself. Otherwise, you can ask the seller to have a third party price the repairs and deduct that amount from the apartment's total price.