How long does a home inspection take?

How long does a home inspection take? How tall is a tree? Ha ha. Of course, the answer is “it depends”.

We typically book a four-hour time slot for the home inspection, and this works well most of the time.

However, many variables affect how long a home inspection takes. Let’s go over the most obvious stuff, and let’s assume everything else is equal.

The House

Large houses take more time to inspect than small houses.

Old houses require more time to inspect than newer ones. Part of this is because old houses have far more failing, rotted, unsafe, or end-of-life components. Used houses have many different components in different stages of their life expectancy, and it’s the home inspector’s job to let the client know about components at the end of their life expectancy.

Remodeled/renovated houses require more time to inspect. When new systems are mixed in with old systems, the house gets more complex. This frequently means additional HVAC systems, electrical subpanels, etc. These additional components significantly increase the time required to inspect a house.

Complicated houses take longer to inspect. The more types of roof coverings, siding, windows, floor coverings, etc., the longer the inspection will take. Several small rooms will take significantly more time to inspect than one large room. And of course, older houses have smaller rooms than newer houses.

Attics and crawl spaces add to the inspection time. Multiple attics and/or crawl spaces significantly increase inspection time.

Tall buildings take more time to inspect than short buildings. This is because it’s more work to access the roof. It’s a piece of cake for a home inspector to pull a Little Giant ladder out of their vehicle and hop onto the roof. That works great for shorter buildings or buildings where the upper roof areas can be accessed from the lower roof areas. It’s much more work to unstrap a 28′ extension ladder from the truck, set it up, then carry it back and strap it to the truck when done.

For example, I spent nearly an hour inspecting the roof surfaces at the home pictured below because I used multiple ladders and took many photos of the roof.

Houses with deferred maintenance (aka – “no maintenance” or “run down”) take a lot longer to inspect. It takes time to document problems, and these areas then need further inspection to determine what else might be wrong.

The Inspector

One inspector could easily take twice as long as the next inspector to inspect the exact same property. Sometimes, this directly reflects the quality of the inspection.

Inspector F might inspect the crawl space by looking into the opening, inspect the roof from the ground with binoculars, and say the attic was obstructed with personal items and could not be inspected.

On that same house, inspector A might inspect the crawl space by crawling through it. Before doing so, she might have to set up a tarp outside the crawl space so as not to make a mess when coming out, go out to her vehicle and change into some coveralls before going into the crawl space, spend ten minutes inspecting the crawl space, then clean everything back up. This same inspector might not have any problem moving the sellers items to gain access to the attic, and would surely walk the roof to inspect it. Just these three items could easily add an hour onto the inspection time.

Some home inspectors produce their inspection reports on-site, which adds considerable time to the inspection. At least, it should. If a home inspector says that producing a report on-site doesn’t add much time to the inspection, they’re probably producing a poorly written inspection report filled with generic disclaimers about everything under the sun and lots of sentences ending with “for its age” (eg – “The 30-year-old roof was in normal condition for its age”).

And some home inspectors talk more.

The Client

Clients with tons of questions make the inspection take longer. Especially the “why” questions.

Engineers take more time. They’re usually not satisfied until they can successfully explain a problem back to us. 

Inspections for first-time home buyers often take longer than inspections for experienced homeowners. First-time homebuyers often need the basics explained: what a furnace is, how it works, and how to change the filter.

Multiple clients at an inspection will usually make things take longer. More questions, more conversations.

The bottom line

Again, our average inspection time is four hours. Sometimes, this gives up plenty of time to look through every nook and cranny at a leisurely pace and enter tons of notes into our software before leaving the property. On other homes, this time flies by very quickly, and all we have time to do is take photos and keep moving along as quickly as possible to get through the inspection before our time is up.

If I had a magic wand, we’d get an unlimited amount of time to inspect every house. We’d charge by the hour, based on both the time required to inspect the house and the time required to write the report. How cool would that be? But that’s a pipe dream that will surely never happen.