What is a 1-Year New Home Warranty Inspection?
You can think of a 1-Year Warranty Inspection kind of like a child’s 1-year doctor’s check up. After a year of settling in, it’s time to take inventory of how things are going. Maybe there’s a leaky faucet or maybe the foundation has begun to settle, leaving cracks in your drywall, or maybe there are a multitude of undetected issues hiding from your untrained eye. For all issues big and small, it’s a good idea to have a home inspector come out and evaluate how your house is performing after a year of being lived in.
A New Home Warranty Inspection is an inspection performed prior to your 1-year builder home warranty expiring. If you never had a New Construction inspection prior to move in, there may be many errors made by your builder that are still undetected; if some issues were noted prior to move in and supposedly corrected, this is also a good time to make sure that all of the fixes were properly taken care of and the house is still functioning as it should be. Ultimately, this is your last chance to compile a complete list of items that need repair and hold the builder accountable for fixing them.
There are many reasons why brand new homes have mistakes:
- With many separate homes being built at different sites and the plethora of activities going on at the same time at each site, it’s nearly impossible for the general contractor to personally monitor all phases of the home construction. Quality control will certainly be inconsistent from one builder to another and can even be inconsistent among homes built by the same contractor in one development.
- The majority of construction tasks (foundation, framing, plumbing, electrical, etc.) are usually subcontracted out. Consideration as to how fast and how cheap the job can get done may rank above quality for the builder.
- The explosion of growth has created a great need for affordable housing. When there is such a large demand and such a small supply, it is significantly easier for less experienced builders to sell their services when time and money overtake quality and reputation as the deciding factors for new home buyers.
- Few, if any, municipal code inspectors spend anywhere near enough time in each home to fully check it out. Further, there could be issues with the home that are not necessarily code violations, yet could still have serious consequences for the new home owner. These deficiencies may not be discovered until it is too late.