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Three separate inspections?
Hi Ladies, I hope you can help me with advice here.
Our offer got accepted and we are now scheduling inspections. The house is running on a well water, and uses sceptic tank. Today, when scheduling a general inspection, the inspector told us that we should not rely on the seller's inspectors for water and sceptic tank, especially that this house is a foreclosure. He advised that we hire special companies that will do their job right because they are hired by us.
We learned that the sceptic tank will cost some $900 (we are in Rockland county, NY). It needs to be done in two parts - one is pumping water in and the other one is to pump the whole sceptic tank empty.
I am not sure how much the water will be because we have not heard back from the company yet.
Does any one of you have experience with this stuff? I am OK doing all of this to find out we still want the house, but if we find some realy bad issue, and decide not to buy, I will be so upset to have spent all this money!
Re: Three separate inspections?
I don't have any experience with this specific situation but...the reason to get inspections is to potentially avoid HUGE expenses/issues later. If the $ now reveals a serious issue that could be $$$$$$ as a homeowner, you will be glad you paid for the inspections.
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If the inspector is telling you that his report isn't adequate, I'd definitely spend the money on the additional inspections.
In the big scheme of things, $900 is nothing (compared to what you're spending on the house, what you COULD be spending on repairs if there were an issue that wasn't detected prior to closing, etc).
If you do not spend the money, you could very well wind up paying a whole lot more to correct deficiencies.
Really? $900 for an inspection? That seems a bit crazy to me.
We had to pay for a termite inspection, a home inspection and a septic inspection on both our house and the one we offered on (and eventually walked away from because of the inspection report) prior. I'm so glad we did for the last house because it saved us potentially $100,000 in repairs that we weren't interested in dealing with.
With our current house we had a septic inspection and they said that it was old and may fail sometime in the near future, but they also said that they have seen septic systems this old last for another decade or more. We looked into the cost to get a new septic tank and it came out to be about $20k. We're not going to do that now, but we are going to make sure we have that much in our emergency fund in case we need to take care of it in the near future. We also looked into getting onto the city sewer system, which, btw, was about $100k and in my mind not worth it.
DEFINITELY do the inspection, but shop around and see if you can find someone who will do it for cheaper. Ours cost $210.
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You are looking at it backwards. If there is a really bad issue and you don't buy, it will have SAVED you tons of money and headache.
It's "septic," not "sceptic"... a "sceptic" [sic] tank would be something else entirely.
Somehow everyone else knew what I meant - if you read my profive you would have known that I am a foreigner - small typos/grammatical errors happen even to Americans. It's just funny that every now and then you get to see a comment that is meant to indulge the poster entirely, without really helping. I hope you are so happy with yourself.
To all others - thank you for your advice. We had the initial inspection today - they found out that our ***septic*** tank is actually under the driveway!!!! Whoever the genius was to put a driveway over the tank, is earning a little curse from me today. Now we have to request an approval from the investor (it's a foreclosure) to pull off a bit of the driveway to inspect the tank.
Good news is - the town is currently installing a new sewage system, so even if we don't get it tested, our attorney said it may be worth to get the house, considering it's good price and condition, and hope that nothing bad happens with the tank till the new system is installed.
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Trust me--get a separate septic inspection. It's worth the money. We did on a house and walked because the house needed a brand new septic..and the sellers weren't willing to pay...around 50K in our area (NJ). We paid $550 for the inspection. We didn't pay to have it pumped though. The sellers arranged that on their own right before our inspection--I think they needed to before we sold.
We held off on the water inspection until after the home and septic inspection. In NJ the seller's have to pay for it and it's independent.