Home inspection in the Sharon region

You have just moved into the new home you bought with your hard-earned money, and you will keep paying off the mortgage for years to come. You want to order a home inspection (bedek bayit) in the Sharon, done right, but you are wondering: once you have the report in hand, one copy for you and one for the contractor, what then?

You ordered a home inspection: what happens next?

Awareness of construction defects is growing, and more buyers want a home inspection engineer, but many do not know what to do with the report afterward, or how to get the most out of it and limit the damage it uncovers.

Sound familiar? Maybe you are weighing whether to order a home inspection in Ramla, or here in the Sharon.

This article walks through the steps buyers need to take to end up with a sound home and years of good living in the property they worked so hard to buy. Read, apply, and share it.

Step one: an inspector from a home inspection company visits your home and carries out a thorough, serious inspection covering:

• Compliance with the Planning and Building Regulations.
• Compliance with the Sanitary Installations Regulations ("Hal'at"), covering plumbing fixtures and sanitary ware, including things like the distance between the toilet and the faucet.
• Water flow at the faucets.
• Compliance with any special specification attached to the contract.
• Compliance with the general specification (known in the trade as "the blue book"), where the contract requires it. (In Israel, contracts are usually tied to the general specification instead of drafting a special one for every project.)
• Compliance with the architectural plans attached to the contract.
• Anything simply unreasonable, such as scratched glass.

A few days later, the inspection engineer issues a detailed report on every defect found, citing the relevant section or regulation for each non-conformity, alongside a price for fixing it.

The company sends the report straight to the contractor

Step two: the inspection company sends one copy of the report to the client and a second to the contractor or developer, setting a reasonable deadline to fix each defect, or financial compensation for anything that cannot be fixed, or that the contractor is unwilling to fix, priced according to the report.

From there, a contractor acting in good faith reaches out to schedule a meeting to discuss the repairs or the compensation, an option contractors tend to like less.

Step three splits two ways. If the contractor keeps his word and fixes everything properly, the saga ends there: you sleep soundly and enjoy the home for years to come, and the contractor will ask you to sign a document, or the report itself, confirming the repairs satisfy you.

If the contractor refuses to fix the defects, ignores the report, or fixes only some of them (the most common outcome), you need to decide whether to go to court, weighing the repair costs, your odds of winning, and how much time and patience you want to spend on it. If you ordered the inspection through us, you can consult us on the best way forward.

One more important tip: many contractors agree to fix only some of the defects on condition that the resident signs away any further right to sue, and clients eager to close the chapter often go along with it. As a Sharon home inspection company, we are clear: never agree to that.

Why order a home inspection engineer at all

The point of ordering one is to make sure the home you bought is sound in every respect: safety, compliance with building standards, the quality of electrical and plumbing fixtures, preventing future waterproofing problems, thermal insulation against heat and cold, acoustic insulation against outside noise, and more.

You may never see it directly, but the money a professional inspection saves you now, and especially down the road, dwarfs the one-time cost of the inspection itself, not to mention the distress it spares you.

In short: order a serious, professional inspector who knows exactly what to check and how. The inspector sends the report to you and the contractor (a step out of your hands), and the contractor then fixes what needs fixing; if he doesn't, reach out to us for guidance on how to proceed. And remember: never sign away your right to sue in exchange for a partial fix of the defects in the report.

Your next step toward getting these defects fixed is to contact us for a quote.