A real estate appraiser plays a part in the home inspection (bedek bayit) process for anyone starting a purchase or a construction project. People sometimes confuse the appraiser's service, which is limited to specific cases, with the comprehensive inspection carried out by an engineer and a team of professionals that includes an appraiser.
The purpose of the inspection is to find construction defects, if any exist, bring them to the parties' attention, and assess the property's value and, if necessary, the cost of the repairs.
Most defects found during a home inspection are repairable, and under the Sale (Apartments) Law, a repairable defect is assessed at the cost of the repair. For that reason, the courts require an engineering expert opinion on construction defects to come from a construction-defects (home inspection) engineer. A handful of defects cannot be repaired at all.
Those leave a loss of value, which the appraiser can assess directly, or which an engineer can estimate theoretically, as the examples below show.
Three defects that can trigger a loss-of-value assessment
1. A narrow corridor. The Planning and Building Regulations require a corridor longer than 4 m to be at least 1.00 m wide, without exception: the usual 2% tolerance does not apply here. The rule exists to keep the escape route safe, and the longer the corridor, the more rooms and people depend on it in an emergency such as a fire.
This kind of defect cannot be fixed, since it is not practical to tear down and rebuild the corridor wall, so it leaves a loss of value that an appraiser must set.
2. Deviation from the plan's dimensions. The regulations allow deviations of up to 2% from the plan. Beyond that, the deviation becomes a construction defect: for example, a room planned at 3.00 m wide that measures only 2.95 m in practice.
Dimensions are measured from plaster to plaster, not from exposed block to exposed block as many contractors assume. Cases like this again leave a loss of value for the appraiser to assess (see the settlement agreement on the "Court rulings" page).
3. A collector shaft in the bathroom. A collector shaft, or collector pipe, is a plasterboard duct carrying the sewage and wastewater piping for the apartments. It sometimes protrudes from the wall and sometimes sits flush inside it. A protruding shaft must be marked on the sale plan, since it reduces the bathroom's usable area.
When it is not marked and the buyer is left thinking the space is open and usable, that omission is itself a construction defect, and, being a non-conformity with the plan, again gives the appraiser grounds to set a loss of value.
*Always check elevator regulations and fire safety as well.
Who decides the loss of value: the appraiser or the engineer? As a rule, the appraiser sets it. In special cases where case law is well established and the loss-of-value figures are fixed, an engineer can set it instead: the collector shaft above, and similar protrusions that reduce a room's area, are recognized examples where an engineer can rely on that case law directly.
Can a home inspection engineer set a repair cost even when the repair is not practical? Yes: courts accept a theoretical repair cost as a valid solution, as in the narrow-corridor example, where moving the wall would, in theory, fix the defect. That theoretical repair estimate is usually higher than the loss-of-value figure an appraiser would set for the same defect.
The engineers of Arad Bedek Bayit, led by building engineer Ron Arad, whom courts appoint as their own expert on construction defects. The company has been inspecting apartments and buildings since 2001. Engineer Ron Arad · More about the company