7 Common Causes of Buyer Walkouts

7 Common Causes:

When they plan to sell their home, most homeowners focus on prettying it up and making it as presentable as possible. It will likely help if you are dealing only with a real estate agent or the buyer, since they are not really equipped to properly assess the state of the property.

However, as soon as a house inspection is requested in Ottawa, such behaviour can lead to serious problems! If you fail during a home inspection, you would have to delay the sale of your property or even be unable to sell it at all. So, it is essential to know what things might fail you and prepare appropriately by fixing the issues the best you can ahead of time.

I personally have prepared a guide to the 6 common things that fail a home inspection to help you do just that.

Damaged roof

 A good roof is essential to any house. It keeps out rain and moisture and prevents weather damage. As such, any serious roof problems will almost immediately mark down your place for inspection failure. Check your attic for wet spots, mold, or moisture damage to know whether you have roof issues.

It is very obvious, so you should quickly see whether your roof is leaking. Fortunately, this is the most straightforward form of damage to fix.

The costlier and more serious issues would be sloping or sagging of your roof, as well as damage to the trusses or constriction keeping it up.

Don’t hide any burns, mold or moisture damage with paint. If found by the inspector or buyer afterwards, this may cause legal issues for you and your realtor for not legally mentioning.

These issues can cost a lot and will almost certainly be a deal-breaker for the potential buyers as well.

If you are set on selling your property, you would have to set aside at least two weeks for such serious repairs before an inspection is viable.

Foundation issues

Hands down the most expensive problem to fix, and one of the main things a home inspection protects you from**, is damaged or faulty house foundation.**

The additional problem is that such issues can be pretty hard to spot if you do not know what to look for.

Typically, they show up in the form of cracks along the connections between floors, along the bottom of your house walls where they connect to the ground, windows and doors that have trouble closing due to the warping of their frames, sudden roofing issues, and leaks in both the attic and the basement.

All of these can be attributed to things other than the foundation by an untrained eye.

More complicated is the fact that foundation can be damaged by anything from settling soil to landslide precursors, and as such, it drives away buyers simply due to its implications.

Being a seller, don’t think you’re being clever hiding these cracks. If photos are taken by the inspector to prove they’ve been hidden, It can be more costly for the seller in the future.

Problems with plumbing

Much easier to solve and spot, though still potentially expensive, are plumbing problems. These problems also have a wide breadth and range of severity. Leaking faucets and clogged pipes are an annoyance but easy to fix.

Much more serious is the need for types of pipe replacements, which might come with the addition of leaks within your walls, floor, or foundation. This would even cause additional issues with mold and water damage.

Even more severe would be cross-connection issues. They can lead to the pollution of the water you would use in daily life.

No one wants to use water contaminated by the content of waste removal pipes. So, that is a certain house inspection fail and refusal to buy.

Such cross-connection and pipe replacement problems are expensive and require a lot of work to fix, including potentially having to dig up the pipes built into your home.

Undersized Appliances

This is a BIG issue with covid, when buying a new build or an older home.

This is a area next to every homeowner doesn’t have proper or any knowledge on, its equivalent to the famous saying “out of sight out of mind.” I don’t know anything about it, so I never have to look at it?!

What this means, some furnace or air conditioners aren’t proper size of that home particularly. An undersized HVAC system may not have enough capacity to heat or cool the space to the desired temperature effectively**.**

This means that it will have to run harder for longer periods of time to try to maintain the desired temperature, resulting in higher energy bills & requiring replacement sooner. There are rare talks of required size for a home, only what’s the cheapest.

Once everything has been installed, to have everything removed & disposed of. With installing of brand new properly sized AC & furnace it starts at min. $8,500 – $14,000 (depending on the square footage of the home)

Now, if you want to shrug your shoulders once you learn this & resell the home. You need to hope your potential buyer doesn’t learn about this information! Or they may request min.$20,000 off the purchasing price.

There isn’t anything about sizing in building code, its only considered sloppy work. All depends the fight in you to keep this or not.

Above is a chart of what you should have in your home, I Always recommend having your HVAC properly inspected during summers.

Pest infestation/not paying to rent/squatters 

I’ve seen very few of these, A pest infestation is a guaranteed fail and impossible to hide from an experienced eye.

We do have some good news, though! Unless you have termites, this is luckily the easiest problem to solve. A good exterminator might take a take or two to solve the issue.

But at least pests rarely leave structural damage behind once they have been taken care of.

An exception, of course, being termites. If you have termite problems, then depending on its build, your house might even have serious structural integrity issues. Roofing problems being practically a guarantee.

In such a case, you would have to perform the necessary repairs before you could hope to sell your house.

Regardless of whether you are selling your property or not, getting rid of pests regularly is an essential part of good home maintenance.

Pests such as mice can also cause wiring issues by chewing on things they shouldn’t!

Mold and water damage

Few things can turn potential buyers away as quickly as mold and water damage can. While the rest of the items on our list require a professional to spot, this issue is obvious.

It is also more often than not a sign of a plethora of other problems.

Implying a potential issue with roof leaks, damaged pipes, high local humidity, possible foundation problems, and more.

It can also render entire rooms useless and leave you searching for storage services so you can get additional space for household items you now have nowhere to put. As such, mold and water damage are a leading reason for buyers to walk away from a purchase.

Mold also has an adverse effect on the health of everyone living in the house by causing allergies.

Faulty wiring

Faulty wiring is a thorny issue to have and the most threatening problem on our list.

Ironically, it is also on the list of most common issues found during the house inspection**. It can be pretty easy to miss or overlook.**

And there are some spots you have no way of checking, seeing as they are built into the wall. However, the exposed wiring in the rest of the house is typically an excellent example of the state of things.

So, it will get you failed if it is in the abysmal condition in a heartbeat. Ignoring issues with wiring can eventually lead to a fire, or frying of expensive electronics.

That is something every homeowner dreads even more than flooding. As such, faulty wiring should always be a priority fix, even if you have other issues to wrangle with.

Final Word

Preparing for a house inspection is not easy, and there is plenty that can fail you.

However, I hope that my list of 7 common things that cause a buyer to walk away from a purchase will help you prepare. As well as better tackle problems in your home!

Nothing fails an inspection, its construction, anything is fixable.

It will all depend on the agreement between the seller and buyer come to? Or if the buyer doesn’t want this potential stress & just wants to walk?

I wish both parties the best of luck in this journey,

I will happily help relieve some of the stress for you!