If you've lived in your town or city for 5 or 10 or 20 years, you will know things about it I can never know and thus you have a distinct advantage over me when it comes to investing - you know what a good price is, what a bad neighborhood is, what house looks good on paper but is underneath the airport flight path, and so on. 

The real design is in the site planning, scientific floor plan and the bones and meat that's underneath the skin of the house that actually makes the house comfortable to live in. 

So my inclination is to have inspections.I'm just worried about something big and unforeseen going wrong, such as a pipe bursting underneath the house.

I am looking to invest in some properties in DFW but did not realize how many houses had foundations issues here due to the clay soils. 

7 - What are the ground soil conditions?

There is beautiful hard wood floors underneath that we refinished.

Oftentimes the reason why these foundation issues occur is due to saturation in the soil below.

What was the deal with the soil out that way?

Anything underneath that is fair game.

Underneath the surface its a little more dicey and one has to be very calculating.