This happened to me a while back but I thought it would be good to share to possibly save someone 10s of thousands of dollars.
I had some foundation cracks and a few small cracks in the drywall of my house. I got worried and called out a foundation company that offered a “free” inspection. The inspector proceeded to tell me that my house was “sinking and breaking in half like the titanic” and I needed $25k in repairs. I became very stressed. With a repair that large, I wanted a second opinion.
I hired a proper structural engineer. It wasn’t cheap, he charged me $450 to look around for about 15 minutes. I had told him what the foundation company had told me and he laughed. I ended up needing no repairs besides a point and retuck. The cracks in the brick? He said those were cracks from thermal expansion. He saved me about $24.5k.
I later read that a lot of the “free” foundation inspectors operate on a commission basis. They will always tell you that you will need foundation work, otherwise they would be going out of business. Beware of free inspections.
This is a great tip!
I’ve never dealt with it on my own home, fortunately, but I used to work in real estate purchase/sale/title litigation and the amount of fly-by-night “inspectors” that would plague my clients with this garbage is truly shocking. I always recommend that home buyers hire a structural engineer, a plumber, and an electrician, plus other experts on a case-by-case basis, not a home inspector (or other types of rando inspectors), for their pre-purchase due diligence. Yes, it is absolutely more expensive up front than a home inspector, but it’s also WAY cheaper than buying a house with serious, possibly irreparable, structural issues that you don’t find out about until 2 years after closing.
The worst, though, were the tree removal “experts.” A huge number of them didn’t seem to care whether the house was still standing after they removed the tree that fell on it, and I ran across more than a few that had some truly questionable billing practices, if not outright fraudulent. I’m sure there are plenty of good ones out there, but boy it didn’t feel like it.
Good on you, OP, for doing the right thing for you and your home! I hope you have many happy and structurally sound years in it!
Oh man, I can second the tree removal experts. We have a corner lot with a lot of large mature trees, and we get tree services knocking on our door monthly, telling us we should cut all of our trees down to “protect the house”. We were concerned enough to hire a certified arborist who worked with an engineering firm, who came out for a couple hundred dollars, assessed our trees, and told us all those companies were morons and our trees were just a bunch of nice healthy oaks.
I had a good experience with an internachi inspector, but that was 2018, and it took him 4.5 hours to do a medium-small house solo.
I grew up in poor mountain areas. Our local tree guy (name was Woody) also did cheap home repairs. He certaintly was not certified or an expert but he would do it pretty cheap along with other odd jobs. He would be the first to tell you if it was something he couldn’t do and he always smelled funny but did a great job.
As an adult I can’t believe my parents hired him but we were really poor and needed a tree to come down before it crushed our house so I suppose desperation played a part.