What a Memphis house tells you in ten minutes, and what needs a crowbar
A lot of out-of-state buyers here are working off photos and an inspection summary, and both of those documents are worse than people think. So here's the honest split from the construction side: what a Memphis house will tell you fast and for free, and what it will not tell anybody until something gets opened.
WHAT YOU CAN KNOW IN TEN MINUTES
These are the things I look at first, and I'd rather you know them than pay me to find them.
The electrical panel, door open. The brand, the amperage, and whether anything looks improvised. Federal Pacific and Zinsco panels still turn up here and they're an automatic replacement, not a judgment call. Sixty or a hundred amps on a house you plan to put central air and a modern kitchen into is also a replacement. Double-tapped breakers tell you an amateur has been in there.
The water heater date sticker. Two minutes, and it tells you two things. Whether you're buying a replacement in year one, and what kind of owner you're buying from. Sixteen years on a water heater is not a maintenance decision, it's a statement about everything else in the house.
The condenser label outside. Age, and whether it's R-22. An R-22 unit that still runs is a unit you are going to replace on the worst possible day, in July, at emergency pricing.
Water pressure and what comes out. Run a tub and a sink at once. If pressure falls off a cliff, you likely have galvanized supply still in the walls. If the water comes out rusty after sitting, same answer.
The roof from the ground, all four sides. Not just the front. Mid-South hail ages roofs faster than the calendar does and the damaged slope is frequently not the one facing the street.
Doors and windows. Open and close every one. Doors that stick at the top corner and windows that won't stay up are the cheapest foundation-movement indicator there is, and you don't need anybody's opinion to read them.
Where the water goes. Stand at the corners in a rain or just look at the grade and the downspouts. Half the foundation problems I see in Memphis are a drainage problem that nobody fixed for fifteen years. Expansive clay swells and shrinks with moisture, so a house with gutters dumping at the foundation is a house that's been moving on purpose.
Smell. Seriously. Musty means moisture, and moisture in this climate means somewhere there's a crawlspace or a wall that's been wet more than once.
WHAT NEEDS A CROWBAR, A CAMERA, OR SOMEBODY UNDER THE FLOOR
None of these are visible, and all of them are bigger than everything above combined.
The drain line. On pre-1970 stock this is cast iron and it is the single most expensive thing you can be wrong about. It doesn't announce itself. A house can drain fine and still have a belly or a crack that shows up the first month a family of four lives there. A camera scope is the cheapest information in the entire transaction and almost nobody buys it before closing. If you take one thing from this post, take that one.
What's actually in the walls. Cloth wiring, knob and tube remnants, and aluminum branch wiring from the late sixties into the early seventies are all live in this market. A panel swap doesn't tell you what's behind the drywall, and plenty of houses have a new panel feeding sixty-year-old circuits.
The framing under a bathroom. On pier-and-beam houses, the subfloor and joists under a tub or toilet are where slow leaks go to do their work. Bouncy floor near a wet area is not a flooring problem.
Whether the foundation has been worked on before. Old pier work, added supports, patched cracks. Somebody dealt with something and the question is whether it held. You don't see that from the living room.
Termites and prior treatment. Memphis is high termite country. Prior damage in a band joist or sill is not visible until it's exposed.
THE PART THAT ACTUALLY COSTS PEOPLE MONEY
An inspection report tells you what is wrong. It does not tell you what it costs, and it is deliberately written not to. "Recommend evaluation by a licensed plumber" is a complete sentence in that world and a useless one in yours. What you need before you commit is a scope with numbers attached, and those are two different documents produced by two different people.
The other thing worth saying plainly: the visible list above is where buyers spend all their attention, and the invisible list is where the money is. That's backwards, and it's backwards because the visible stuff is the only part a photo can carry. A kitchen photographs. A drain line does not.
If you're buying here from out of state, spend your inspection period on the crowbar list. The ten-minute list you can get from anybody with a phone and a flashlight, including the agent already standing in the house.
Full disclosure, I run a construction company here in Memphis, so I'm on the receiving end of the calls that come after somebody skips the second list.
Curious what the local operators would add. I'd bet there's a regional tell I've left off, and the ones that come from people who've owned through a failure are usually better than the ones that come from people who fix them.