Is it necessary to do a technical inspection before buying a home?

The answer is YES, of course yes, it is very necessary. Carrying out a technical inspection before
buying a home is a fundamental step in ensuring the safety and health of new owners, as it can
detect potential problems that affect the buying process.
If you are thinking of hiring a technical inspection but you do not know its benefits very well, in
this article we are going to try to explain the reasons why you should take the step and not
hesitate to hire one.
A technical inspection is a detailed assessment, carried out by an expert professional, of a
property that can reveal technical, documentary and physical defects in a building.
Such is the relevance of this technical report for the safety of buyers, that in countries such as
the United States, technical inspection is mandatory. However, in Spain it is not mandatory
and this leads to bad experiences and unpleasant surprises.
For this reason, we always advise our clients to hire a technical inspection prior to the
purchase of their home to check its condition. On many of the occasions that an inspection has
been carried out in our already extensive professional experience, a problem has appeared
and then been resolved.
Sometimes, the inspection has prevented problems for the buyers, and therefore the main
objective of carrying out an inspection of the property before its acquisition is to be able to
check if it suffers from problems that may affect the safety and health of the future owners. I
remember a case in the office of a client who hired a technical inspection and the result of the
report determined that the concrete of the structure of the house had a problem of
aluminosis, a disease of concrete. This problem is so serious that it had no option but to be
remedied and may have lead to the cancelation of the purchase. However, our client really
liked the location of the property and this served to negotiate that the offer would only be for
the land and not for the building because it was unlivable. In the end, the operation was a
success and we prevented the buyer from buying a home that did not meet the safety
conditions.
In most cases, the severity of the issues are minor and they usually have a solution, which
translates into some economic adjustment and/or serves to negotiate the purchase price
downwards. Then the benefit is double when hiring the inspection, on the one hand you know
the technical condition of the home you want to buy and on the other hand, it can help you to
renegotiate the price.
Once this inspection has been carried out and with the result of it, we obtain information
about the property and consequently can help to make the most appropriate decisions in this
regard.
One of the cases that we find recurrently is that the result of the inspection determines that
the house has damp problems that have tried to be concealed with paint but were not
repaired correctly. This could influence the purchase because either the buyer decides not to
go ahead with the transaction because he is not willing to pay for its repair, or he can demand

that the seller repair it properly or on the contrary, he decides to renegotiate the purchase
price with the seller downwards.
In conclusion, our legal advice is that before buying a home you hire an expert professional to
technically inspect it so that you can avoid future problems such as collapse of the structure,
dampness, cracks, problems in the ground or foundations, illegal extensions, etc