You Need To Know The Difference Between A Home Inspection & an Appraisal

What is a Home Inspection?  What is a Site Visit?  Which One Do I Need?

 

As real estate appraisers, clients are sometimes surprised at exactly how much of their property we need to see.  Sometimes clients are surprised when we tell them the appraisal will take more than 5 minutes, other times they’re surprised when we tell them it won’t take 3 hours.  Regardless of how long a home inspection or a real estate appraisal takes, we often get questions like:

 

“So you’re not going to get on your back and squeeze through our crawl space to look for rot?”

 

“You didn’t bring a ladder?”  How will you get on the roof to see the chimney?”

 

“How will you make sure our pool is working?  You didn’t bring a snorkel?

 

 

While there are a few similarities between the two, and in some places appraisers and inspectors look for the same thing, they ultimately serve very different purposes.  

A site visit is only part of a real estate appraisal, while a home inspection can usually be started and finished directly on site.  In this short video, we explain the difference between a home inspection and a site visit.

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ajR0ytFARY

 

For more short-and-sweet informative videos, visit our YouTube Channel.

 

 Jonathan Montgomery is the founder and president of the The Real Estate Appraisal Group, and has been a real estate professional since 1998. He has been a broker, an investor, and currently works full-time  as an appraiser.  He enjoys handling real estate appraisals in Washington D.C., Southern Maryland, and Northern Virginia.

 

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