09/23/2026
So, what does a home inspector do anyway? Two things we don't do (that are often expected) is to tell you whether a house is worth the listing price or if it's up to code. Here's why:
An appraiser is the one who determines the fair market value of the home. Their role in the homebuying or refinancing process is to prevent the lender from writing a mortgage for more money than the house is worth. He or she will check out the general condition of the home and combine that with a number of other data points, including the sale prices of comparable homes in the area and the home's location, to determine the value. An appraiser may look to see that the HVAC system exists and isn't a rusted hulk, but he or she doesn't test it or anything else in the home for functionality. Just as they don't do our job, we don't do theirs. We probably could find all those data points and make a good guess at a fair market value, but we'd rather spend our time doing the job we've been trained to do!
Code inspections are a full time job for a good reason: lots of different groups issue building code, and towns, cities, counties, and states in the US are free to combine and adapt the code as they wish. The code in any given municipality may therefore be slightly different from the code in the next town over. We perform inspections in 5+ counties, which means working in well over two hundred municipalities - it's just not realistic to hope to know the exact code for each location. The good news is, for home inspection purposes the code really doesn't matter!
What matters is safety. Building practices while the home was built or previously renovated generally don't run afoul of code because the work was done according to the code at the time. If there's anything found in a home inspection which was okay when it was done but is known to potentially be problematic now it will be called out on the inspection report. We don't have to know the exact code reference to know that it's wrong.
And that's what we do: we give an honest assessment of the condition of the home on the day we're there, pointing out anything that's potentially dangerous or needs repair/replacement. Our goal is always to give our clients all the info they need to make informed decisions.
