How long does a home inspection take?

The clock starts at the exterior. We walk the perimeter first, looking at grading, drainage, siding or stucco condition, penetrations, hose bibs, the condenser, and the general relationship between the house and the water that lands on it. That walk tells us where to spend our time inside. A house with negative grading on the north side and a downspout dumping against the foundation gets a much closer look at that interior wall and that section of crawl space than one where the water is being handled correctly.

The roof and the attic are the two places where time varies the most. A single-plane shingle roof on a one-story ranch takes twenty minutes. A cut-up hip roof with six valleys, three penetrations per plane, and a dead-flat porch section takes twice that. Attics are the same story. Some are stand-up height with a floored walkway. Some require crawling on your stomach across ceiling joists in 130-degree heat to reach the far corner where the truss connectors actually are. We go to the far corner either way, which is part of why our times run honest rather than optimistic.

Adding insurance inspections extends the visit, but less than people expect. Because we are already in the attic and already on the roof, the wind mitigation documentation adds roughly thirty to forty-five minutes, mostly spent photographing truss-to-wall connections at the required locations and confirming deck attachment nail pattern and size. A 4-point adds maybe twenty to thirty minutes on top of the home inspection, since the panel, water heater, HVAC, and roof are already being evaluated. Booked together, all three usually finish inside four hours.

Report writing happens after we leave, and that is real work too. A thorough inspection generates somewhere between eighty and two hundred photographs, and every finding that goes in the report needs an image, a description of the condition, and a clear recommendation. We write the same day in nearly every case, which is why our reports land in your inbox that evening or the next morning rather than three days later when your contingency clock has already burned a third of its length.

What we would ask of you as the buyer: give the visit a full block on your calendar rather than trying to squeeze it between showings. You do not need to be there the whole time, and most buyers should not be. But being there for the last forty-five minutes, walking the house with us while we explain what we found and why it matters, is worth more than reading the report cold. That walkthrough is where you learn which items are ten-dollar fixes and which ones should change your offer.