A professional Home Inspection can’t be completed in a few minutes…it takes time to go through a home and make assessment of the function, configuration, and condition of all of the various materials, components, systems that comprise the residential dwelling.
So how long does it take? Here are a few factors that directly relate to the time it will take for a Home Inspection to be performed:
- The size of the home – Obviously, larger homes will take longer to inspect. There is, simply, more real estate to cover and more systems that need to be evaluated. A small home in excellent condition can be inspected much more quickly than a very large mansion in an equally as good condition.
- The age of the home – This factor is very important. Older homes take longer to inspect because there are more potential issues that might be present…and there has been more time during which problems could develop or for the effects of deferred maintenance to become apparent. While older homes are usually somewhat more difficult to inspect, they are often very interesting to inspect. Older homes take longer to inspect than newer homes.
- The previous use of the home – A home that has been used as a rental property often has more defects because of a general neglect of the property that is often apparent. While this is not always so, it’s quite common for rental properties to be in less than pristine condition. The same rationale is able to be aptly applied to many homes that have entered foreclosure.
- The experience level of the Home Inspector – An experienced Home Inspector can perform a Home Inspection faster than one that may not have a great deal of experience…this just stands to reason, right? Generally, though, the time it takes to accomplish an inspection is not directly related to the quality of the inspection.
On average, the inspection of a 2500 to 3000 square foot home, that’s less than 25 years of age will typically take an experienced inspector somewhere around 2.5 to 3 hours to inspect. This time, though, often does not include the time it will take to generate the resulting inspection report. That 2.5 to 3 hour number can be used as a baseline to which some of the other noted considerations can be applied to arrive at close estimate.