How to Waive the Home Inspection When Making an Offer on a House

Provide a negotiation platform with the seller. After a home inspection, you have a detailed report with photographs that explain anything that’s wrong with the property. The report is produced by a licensed professional which lends some credibility to the inspection. You can take the report and use it as a base from which to request repairs or ask for financial concessions from the seller.

Determine whether you really want the house or not. If there are too many things wrong with the property, or the property contains a major structural defect, you might want to walk away regardless of what the seller is willing to repair.

Create a roadmap of things to repair once you move in. This is even more useful when buying into an older, smaller condo building. Older condos specifically, because new ones are usually still in pretty good condition since they’ve just passed all the various city inspections. And smaller condo associations in particular, because associations of less than twenty units tend to forego regular engineering reserve reports, and oftentimes have no idea what needs to be repaired or budgeted for. A home inspection report is a great resource for a small condo association to have an idea of what needs to be repaired. 

Do a full home inspection before you submit the offer. Generally good for when you know you’re going to win the offer--although how you know is an entirely separate discussion and a lot has to do with your agent being very good. Also, your agent needs to be able to convince the seller to allow the full inspection. Many times sellers won’t want to do this because they worry about the seller defect disclosure laws.

Do an informal home inspection walkthrough. Your agent might know a professional in the housing construction world that would be willing to walk through the property and give you a sense of whether it’s solid or not and what the upcoming repairs might be. General contractors, structural engineers, plumbers, electricians, and mechanical engineers are professionals that can help shed a lot of light onto whether a property is good or not.

There’s also a lot of due diligence that can be done regardless of whether you waive the home inspection or not. Usually when waiving the inspection, you have to do the due diligence before you make the offer since everything is pretty much a done deal otherwise. The following are some areas where you can learn more about the property or neighborhood. Some towns will have more departments to research through, some will have less. You’ll likely have to do some of these on your own as certain department officials prefer dealing with consumers and not real estate agents, while your agent can definitely help with the rest: