Home Inspections in Northeast Florida

Typically $300 to $675 depending mostly on square footage and age. A small condo or a 1,100 sq ft slab home sits at the low end; a 3,500+ sq ft home with a crawl space and outbuildings sits at the high end. Call 904-806-7679 with the address and square footage and you'll get a firm number before you book — no estimating games.

Plan on two to three and a half hours on site for most single-family homes. Small condos can be under two hours. Large or older homes with crawl spaces, multiple HVAC systems or detached structures run longer. The report is emailed the same day or the next morning.

You're welcome to be, and most buyers get real value out of the last 30 to 45 minutes. Come toward the end and we will walk you through what we found on the actual components — where the shutoffs are, how old the equipment is, what to watch. Attending is not required and the report stands on its own.

A home inspection follows the InterNACHI Standards of Practice: it is a non-invasive, visual examination of accessible areas. It does not include opening walls, moving stored belongings, determining remaining life expectancy of equipment, judging code compliance, cosmetic issues, or predicting future failures. Wood-destroying organism reports, septic, well water quality, mold sampling and pool equipment are separate scopes.

No. No Florida law and no lender requires a general home inspection. Lenders may require a 4-point or wind mitigation report for insurance, and VA loans require a WDO report, but the general inspection is entirely your choice. It is also the only part of the process that exists purely to protect you rather than the lender or the seller.

The buyer, in nearly every Northeast Florida transaction, and payment is due at the time of service. That is intentional — you are the client, the report belongs to you, and it does not go to the seller or the listing agent unless you send it.

Then it did its job. Under a standard Florida FAR/BAR inspection contingency you can request repairs, request a credit, renegotiate price, or cancel within the contingency window. We do not do repairs and do not refer you to a favorite contractor, so there is no incentive to inflate anything — you just get what's there.

The InterNACHI Standards of Practice exclude anything not readily accessible or not visible, so concealed framing, buried utility lines, the interior of walls, and systems behind finished surfaces are out of scope. Also excluded are wells and septic systems, wood-destroying organisms (a separate FDACS license in Florida), mold sampling, air quality testing, seawalls and shoreline structures, irrigation and low-voltage landscape systems, and solar or geothermal equipment. Detached structures, pools and spas, and swimming pool equipment are commonly offered as add-ons rather than included by default. The inspection also does not estimate repair cost or determine code compliance. We do not perform WDO or mold inspections, but we are happy to help connect you with a licensed WDO or mold inspector, and we will tell you plainly which specialist a particular finding calls for. If any of these matter to your purchase, say so when you book so the right specialist is scheduled alongside the inspection rather than after your contingency period has closed.

It gets documented as an inaccessible area with the reason stated, and it stays a known unknown rather than becoming a silent gap. Common causes are a scuttle blocked by shelving, an attic with insufficient headroom or no walkable decking, a panel with a dead front the seller has painted over, or an air handler closet packed with stored belongings. The right response is to have the obstruction cleared and schedule a short return visit, which usually costs far less than the full inspection. Do not accept an inaccessible service panel on an older home. The panel is where the highest-consequence findings live, from double-tapped breakers to aluminum branch wiring terminations to a brand that will complicate your insurance. Have the seller provide access before your contingency deadline.

Separate the report into three buckets before you write anything to the seller. Bucket one is safety and active water intrusion: reversed polarity, an open ground on a bathroom circuit, an active roof leak, a gas leak, a failed water heater T&P discharge. Bucket two is functional defects with real cost and finite life: a compressor at end of service, corroded distribution piping, a roof with under three years remaining. Bucket three is maintenance and cosmetics. Ask for bucket one, price bucket two and ask for a credit rather than a repair so you control the contractor and the quality, and let bucket three go. Sellers dig in when a request list reads as thirty items of equal weight. They cooperate when it reads as four items with photographs and a reason.

Yes, when the repairs were in the safety or water-intrusion bucket, and always when the work should have been permitted. A re-inspection is a short focused visit that verifies the specific items were actually corrected and corrected properly, and it costs a fraction of the original inspection. What it catches most often is a repair done to make the report line go away rather than to fix the cause: a ceiling stain painted over with no roof work above it, a GFCI installed at the wrong point in the circuit, a condensate line cleared but the failed float switch left in place, a handyman replacing a water heater without a permit, without an expansion tank, and without a properly terminated relief discharge. Ask for invoices and permit records at the same time.