Standard Home Inspections
Home inspections can help you buy or sell your property with confidence. As trained professionals at Hudson Valley Property Inspections, we have seen a lot of different conditions, and we’ll provide invaluable help in turning you into a knowledgeable consumer. Property owners can identify problems in the making and take preventive measures to avoid costly repairs. Sellers can understand conditions the buyer’s inspector may point out and put the property in better selling condition by making repairs. Our inspections include:
Sellers Inspections
Whether you are selling your home on your own or using a realtor, it’s always a prudent idea to have a professional home inspection. Knowledge is power. All homes have strengths and weaknesses: we help you answer how serious the problems are and which must be immediately addressed and which can wait. The more you know about your home, the more prepared you will be for negotiation.
New Construction Inspection
One of the most common myths related to new home construction is that new homes don’t need to be inspected. I personally know several people that have purchased new homes and didn’t have them inspected because they were ‘new’. I’ve seen far too many problems on new construction homes to think that they’re not worth first inspecting, regardless of the builder. One common myth that builders will sometimes tell buyers is that the home has already been inspected many times by the city as part of the permit process, so the buyer is wasting their money hiring a private inspector. While there may have been many brief inspections performed by the city along the way, things still get missed every day. Another myth is that because a home is new, there won’t be problems. While new homes don’t have the same types of problems as old homes (such as components reaching the end of their life expectancy), they can still have serious issues, typically related to improper building and installation methods. These are the types of issues that an average homeowner will know much less about.
Environmental Hazards
Our job as your professional home inspector is to alert you, to the extent possible, to unknown problems and potential environmental hazards in your current or potential house. Ours is a non-invasive visual inspection of your property which can alert you to possible problems.
We can test for these environmental issues:
- Mold: There are many types of mold, and none of them will grow without water or moisture. Molds can produce allergens, irritants, and in some cases, potentially toxic substances (mycotoxins).
- Radon: Is a cancer-causing, radioactive gas. You can’t see radon. And you can’t smell it or taste it. But it may be a problem in your home. Radon is estimated to cause many thousands of deaths each year. That’s because when you breathe air containing radon, you can get lung cancer. In fact, the Surgeon General has warned that radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States today. Only smoking causes more lung cancer deaths. If you smoke and your home has high radon levels, your risk of lung cancer is especially high.
We can advise you on these environmental issues:
- Asbestos: Asbestos material that crumbles easily if sawed, scraped, or sanded into a powder is more likely to create a health hazard because it can be inhaled into the lungs, increasing the risk of disease.
- Lead: Lead is a highly toxic metal that was used for many years in products found in and around our homes. In general, the older a home, the more likely it has lead-based paint.