Sewer Inspections- Northern Utah

[Melanie Parkham]

I work for my sister and brother-in-laws construction Company (we do sewer inspections & replacements) and would love to know how many investors actually go through with the sewer inspections in addition to the regular home inspection? We still find that we get a lot of calls from people who skipped these in the home buying process and are reaching out after the fact, when experiencing issues. If you do get them, it is because of a realtors suggestion? Or bad experience? Or do you skip altogether? Would love to hear from investors and realtors on this to get some perspective! Let me know! 

[Marcus Auerbach]

@Melanie Parkham we have a lot of old homes in Milwaukee, 60-120 years with clay tile sewer laterals. Inspections are not common, they are an extra step and they are relativley expensive, so as an agent I see it very rearely. As an investor in more than a decade we have had only one lateral fail in our entire portfolio. And it failed after years of owning the property. They had a piece of wood prop up the line and it had rotten away over the last 60 years, so the line broke.

The issue is that once you have a failure as a homeowner you find out quickly. Stuff catches on and soon it backs up. Inspecting a sewer line that does not back up has a very high probability to come back negative, otherwise it would have started backing up.

As part of our rehabs we always snake the line out after rough in, most have never been snaked in 60 years and its better to do it before we finishe the house. Plumber is already on site.