What do home inspectors look for?

Safety comes first because it is the one category where the consequence is not financial. Obsolete panels with known failure histories, missing GFCI protection at wet locations, ungrounded receptacles wired to three-prong outlets, gas appliance venting problems, missing handrails on stairs, unsafe deck attachment, and unlabeled or improperly sized breakers all get flagged plainly. We do not soften safety language to keep a deal comfortable. If a Federal Pacific Stab-Lok panel is in the house, you are going to read that clearly in the report.

Water is the second category and in Florida it is the expensive one. We follow water everywhere it goes: off the roof, through the flashings, down the walls, across the grade, under the slab, into the crawl space, and out through the condensate line. Most of what looks like a structural problem in this state started as a water problem five years earlier. Staining at ceilings, efflorescence on block, soft trim at the bottom of door casings, elevated moisture behind a shower wall, and a condensate line dumping against the foundation are all the same story at different stages.

Structural movement is third, and it needs judgment more than instruments. Florida slabs crack, and most of that cracking is shrinkage rather than settlement. What we are looking for is a pattern: doors that no longer latch on one end of the house, diagonal cracks running from window corners, separation at the joint between an addition and the original structure, and floors that slope consistently in one direction. One crack is a crack. A pattern is movement, and movement gets a recommendation for further evaluation rather than a guess from us.

End-of-life systems are the fourth category and they drive most repair negotiations. Roofs, HVAC equipment, and water heaters all have predictable service lives, and we document age wherever a data plate, a permit, or a serial number lets us. In Northeast Florida a shingle roof past twenty years is generally near the end regardless of how it looks, condensers near the coast corrode faster than inland units, and water heaters past twelve years are living on borrowed time. Insurance carriers care about these dates as much as buyers do.

Workmanship is the fifth, and it is where pattern recognition from 20+ years of construction and renovation experience earns its keep. Unpermitted additions, converted garages with no proper ventilation, DIY electrical in the attic, a water heater installed with no expansion tank or drain pan, roof repairs that were sealed rather than flashed, and framing cut through for a duct run. None of these are visible in listing photos. All of them tell you something about how the house has been maintained, which is often more predictive than any single defect we find.