The answer is YES, of course yes, it is very necessary. Carrying out a technical inspection before buying a home is a fundamental step in ensuring the safety and health of new owners, as it can detect potential problems that affect the buying process.
If you are thinking of hiring a technical inspection but you do not know its benefits very well, in this article we are going to try to explain the reasons why you should take the step and not hesitate to hire one.
A technical inspection is a detailed assessment, carried out by an expert professional, of a property that can reveal technical, documentary and physical defects in a building.
Such is the relevance of this technical report for the safety of buyers, that in countries such as the United States, technical inspection is mandatory. However, in Spain it is not mandatory and this leads to bad experiences and unpleasant surprises.
For this reason, we always advise our clients to hire a technical inspection prior to the purchase of their home to check its condition. On many of the occasions that an inspection has been carried out in our already extensive professional experience, a problem has appeared and then been resolved.
Sometimes, the inspection has prevented problems for the buyers, and therefore the main objective of carrying out an inspection of the property before its acquisition is to be able to check if it suffers from problems that may affect the safety and health of the future owners. I remember a case in the office of a client who hired a technical inspection and the result of the report determined that the concrete of the structure of the house had a problem of aluminosis, a disease of concrete. This problem is so serious that it had no option but to be remedied and may have lead to the cancelation of the purchase. However, our client really liked the location of the property and this served to negotiate that the offer would only be for the land and not for the building because it was unlivable. In the end, the operation was a success and we prevented the buyer from buying a home that did not meet the safety conditions.
In most cases, the severity of the issues are minor and they usually have a solution, which translates into some economic adjustment and/or serves to negotiate the purchase price downwards. Then the benefit is double when hiring the inspection, on the one hand you know the technical condition of the home you want to buy and on the other hand, it can help you to renegotiate the price.
Once this inspection has been carried out and with the result of it, we obtain information about the property and consequently can help to make the most appropriate decisions in this regard.
One of the cases that we find recurrently is that the result of the inspection determines that the house has damp problems that have tried to be concealed with paint but were not repaired correctly. This could influence the purchase because either the buyer decides not to go ahead with the transaction because he is not willing to pay for its repair, or he can demand that the seller repair it properly or on the contrary, he decides to renegotiate the purchase price with the seller downwards.
In conclusion, our legal advice is that before buying a home you hire an expert professional to technically inspect it so that you can avoid future problems such as collapse of the structure, dampness, cracks, problems in the ground or foundations, illegal extensions, etc
