Construction Oversight
Why a brand-new home still needs inspecting: what gets left out during construction, why it happens, and when to catch it.
Clients buying new construction reasonably ask why they would pay to inspect a house nobody has lived in yet. Shouldn't a brand-new home be finished?
The two-word answer is construction oversight: components inadvertently left out during the build. To have a new home inspected in Laguna Niguel, call (714) 371-8422 or request an inspection.
What gets missed
The oversights that turn up most often are ordinary rather than exotic:
- Electrical work left incomplete
- Plumbing left incomplete
- Gutters installed incorrectly
- Roofing components missing
- Fireplaces left unfinished
None of these are dramatic on the day. All of them are considerably easier to resolve before the sale closes than after.
Why it happens
Building a house is a scheduling problem as much as a construction one. A new home is a grid of subcontractors, each dependent on the others finishing their part inside a given window, and most of them working several houses at once.
When one trade runs late the whole sequence has to be resequenced, and someone comes back to a house at a different point than planned. That is where things get missed - not usually through bad work, though that happens too, but through a handoff that did not quite land. The more delays a build has had, the more of these there tend to be.
When to catch it
Before the close of the sale, while the builder still has an obvious reason to put things right and you still have a contract to point at. An inspection at that stage gives the contractor a specific list rather than a complaint.
Where a build can be inspected at stages - a phase inspection - it is better still, because things are checked while they are still reachable rather than after they have been closed up behind finished surfaces.
What the inspection covers
The same scope as any other: grounds, exterior, utilities, interior, kitchen and bathrooms, visually, roof to foundation. New construction is not a different kind of inspection, only a different set of likely findings.
Ingraffia Home Inspections has been inspecting across Orange County since 2003. Call (714) 371-8422, or see the published pricing.