Hello!
These are fun to talk about! Everyone loses deals. I tend to be very thorough, and I tend to spot these issues before we get to inspection - but there's always a first time! In my younger days, I had deals fall apart from time to time. These are the reasons why!
Transcript
Hello, Matt Heisler here with another homebuyer helper video, and this one is on my five home inspection deal breakers. These are all items where I know that if they are found, my deal is probably not savable. This isn't because the problems aren't fixable, but just because most of the time, the buyers have no interest, and some of them are really difficult to fix, so it's just easier to move on. If you stick around, I'll also give you five things that most homebuyers think are deal breakers but really aren't, and we'll talk about them a little bit too.
Jumping right into the deal breakers, the first thing at the top of my list is raccoons. If raccoons are living in the house, that's a deal breaker. Unfortunately, raccoons tend to make latrines, which are exactly what you would think they are. Their feces are toxic to humans, and you need Hazmat teams to go clean them up. If you find raccoons in a house, that deal is dead; it's just not going to survive that. Most homebuyers are not prepared to take that on, even if the seller tells them it's okay.
Now, I have mold on here, but what I really mean is extreme cases of mold. I mean mold where it requires a ton of cleanup. All houses have mold. For the buyers out there thinking, "I'm going to find a house without mold," unless you live in the desert, where I live, it rains. We have lots of water. There's mold in every house. What you're really looking for is areas where it's extreme. When I know it's a deal-killer is if I go up into the attic and basically the entire attic is covered in mold. Those buyers are just not prepared for that. They get very nervous about it, and even though it can be cleaned up, mold can be remediated in many ways. It's usually a deal-killer.
Evidence of fire is another deal breaker. Sometimes we have home inspections and, after poking around and looking at places that are not necessarily obvious the first time you go through the house, we find evidence that the house has already had a fire. Most of the time, it's been fixed and fixed properly, but if it wasn't disclosed by the seller that their house had had a significant fire, this is usually a deal-killer. Homebuyers get very nervous about this stuff, and if they're even concerned a little bit that the house is no longer safe, they're out.
Lead paint is another concern. Most of the time, if you're looking at houses in the lead paint era, I can give you an idea of how much lead paint there is or isn't, but every once in a while, the buyer hasn't really thought about what it means to have lead paint there in terms of their cost or risk. Then we go and have a lead paint inspection, and if enough lead paint comes up, it can kill an inspection. I even had an inspection where the house was deemed lead safe. The only lead they found was in tiles, which are considered encapsulated, but it didn't matter. The buyer walked, which again is ridiculous, but it's indicative of what I'm talking about here, which is that there are just some things that homebuyers can't get past.
Finally, termites. I'm not talking about a little termite damage, but I'm talking about significant termite damage. The reason is very simple. Neither the seller nor the buyer, in terms of the inspection, had any idea how much damage there really has been. It's because termites will do damage behind the walls, so the only way to find out is you've got to open up the whole house. Most of the time, what's going to happen in these situations is the deal is going to fall apart. The seller is going to hire someone to fix it, and then they're going to put the house back on the market. That's usually going to happen when there are cases of significant termite damage.
Do these have to break deals? Should you break your deal? It really depends on the issues, your level of risk tolerance, and the price you're getting compensated in order to put up with those issues. I wouldn't do it for nothing. I mean, I'd do it for some level of compensation, some level of deal that I was getting in that particular transaction.
We're wrapping up here with the five deal breakers for this video. This video ran a little long, so in the next video, I'm going to talk about five things that come up where the homebuyer almost always wants to walk away, but they really shouldn't because they aren't that serious a problem, and I'll tell you why. Stick around for that video and subscribe if you want to see it, and we'll talk to you next time.
