Do You Have a Property Inspection Checklist?
Over the weekend, Kelly and I looked at six properties we were interested in and we ended up putting an offer on one of them. We didn’t hesitate on the offer we put in because we were very confident in the property. Now, when you’re looking at investing thousands of dollars on a property, it is extremely important that you know what you’re buying. You don’t want to miss things, and looking at the property with a critical eye is very important. It’s very easy to overlook things when you’re inspecting a property and that’s why we always take our Inspection Checklist with us.
Click on the link and you can see that this is a simple 1-page form that we can use when inspecting a property. We simply print it out, put it on a clipboard and we use it to systematically go through each house we look at. This checklist is a system for us and it incorporates several important elements:
- First of all, it provides a full checklist of potential issues with a property. When we’re done we can be sure that we’ve completed a thorough inspection of the property.
- It provides a way for us to document the repairs that are necessary or the things we want ask our contractors about. When you’re looking at six houses in one day, the repairs can start to run together and it is very difficult (if not impossible) to remember what needs to be done on each property. The checklist takes care of this problem and gives us a way to take very good notes.
- For each item in the checklist we also show directional pricing for common repairs that may need to be performed. With this information we can quickly develop an estimate for the repairs that are necessary. This is very important for turning offers around very quickly. If we know it’s a good deal, there’s a good chance other investors will think so too. If we can get our offer in and accepted before anyone else looks at the property we have a big advantage.
Now, there are some houses we walk into that we know are not for us with a few sniffs (sometimes literally). But for the properties that pass the initial sniff test our inspection checklist servers as a great tool for us to fully evaluate the property. Once we have the checklist filled out we use it as input to our financial calculations, and we can quickly develop our offer.
So this weekend we used this system to look at six houses and we wrote one offer…we’ll see where it goes, but hopefully it will be our next property.
Stay tuned…
3 bed / 1 bath Brick Ranch with Basement & 2-Car Garage
