Investment Property Inspections

For those of you who do investment property inspections (move-in/move-out) how is your pricing vs your standard inspection price? Thanks in advance.

what would your inspection cover?
what is the purpose of the inspection?

Inspection is performed for a landlord at the beginning and end of a client lease. Pictures of every room, check every window/door, appliance, smoke/CO detector. Report with photos of everything for verification of condition.

the value of my time is a precious & limited commodity & rarely changes in my universe
regardless of the client type
as i type i have less & need to value it accordingly
ymmv

The way I look at it, almost anything you do is either going to take half a day or keep you from putting an inspection in the morning or afternoon slot. Making arrangements, drive time, gas, and billing time/expenses are no different from a regular inspection.

Unless these inspections provide a significant income stream to you, you might not wish to court such work by trying to hit a price point that will please the property owner.

If someone were to ask me to do this in the DFW market, I would start at $150, charge more if it were outside a 15-mile radius from my office, and charge $100/hour for my time there. My guess is that they would find someone else or decide to do it themselves. Not exactly a good use of a trained and licensed inspector’s time.

I have thought about offering similar inspections, I have rental property, here is my view from a landlords side.

the cost of your service would need to be less that the applicable deposit that I would be able to keep. I do not see a judge allowing the cost of a professional to document the condition of the property so that I can charge that back to my tenant.

rental inspections are better served for the tenant in my opinion. this would potentially give them a way to protect their security deposit from the landlord by documenting the condition of the home upon exit. Again the cost would have to be less that the deposit that it is intended to protect.

I do perform inspections for renters that are having issues with getting their landlord to fix or repair issues with the home. I charge $275 and follow the universal building maintenance codes, this is what most cities follow for rental housing.

I would say that about 1/4th of the people that call me about this actually hire me, they view the cost too high.