Mold Inspection Before You Buy in Greater Boston

Where a mold inspection sits in the sequence

The local order of operations runs the same way in Cambridge as it does out along the Dorchester avenues. The offer gets accepted. A short inspection period follows, its length written into the offer. Inspections happen inside that period. Anything you want to renegotiate has to be raised before the purchase and sale agreement is signed. After that the leverage changes and the conversation turns to the mortgage.

A general home inspector is a generalist and a good one will flag staining, damp and a musty smell. What they usually will not do is sample, interpret a lab result or trace a moisture path through three units. That is a separate booking, which is exactly why the timing gets tight: wait for the general inspection to raise the question and you have already spent half the window.

Call the day the offer is accepted, before the general inspection is even scheduled. Ask two things. Can they come inside the window. Does the lab turnaround fit if sampling turns out to be worth doing. Both answers can be given over the phone.

What to look at yourself, starting in the cellar

Nobody is going to hand you a moisture history of the building. What you know about that cellar is mostly what you or your inspector see while standing in it, which is a good reason to spend real time down there instead of glancing at the boiler on the way past.

Use your nose first, at the bottom of the stairs, before anyone opens a window. Then look along the base of the walls for a tide line, a chalky white bloom or a fresh band of masonry paint over stone. Look for rust rings around the feet of steel columns and appliances. Find the floor drain and see whether it is dry or damp. Check the sill above the areaway and the bottom of the bulkhead stairs. Note whether the storage is up on pallets, since people do that for a reason. If a dehumidifier is running, ask how long it has been part of the household.

Upstairs, walk the perimeter of the top-floor ceilings and look at the corners and the tops of window casings. Open the closets on exterior walls and put your face in them. Ask to have the knee-wall or attic hatch opened. Run the bath fan and hold a square of tissue against it. Outside, look at where the downspouts end, whether the grade falls toward the foundation and what shape the valleys and the rear low-slope roof are in.

Ask the seller's side, in writing, whether water has ever come into the cellar or through the roof and what was done about it. The answer may be nothing useful. Asking still puts the question on the record and it occasionally turns up a receipt for work nobody would have mentioned otherwise.

Condo paperwork the seller will not read for you

If you are buying a unit in one of the converted two-families and three-families that fill Somerville, Medford and the streets off Dorchester Avenue, the documents are as informative as the cellar. Ask for the master deed, the trust and bylaws, the current budget, the reserve balance, any history of special assessments, the certificate of insurance and the minutes of trustee meetings going back several years.

Read the minutes for water. Repeated discussion of roof leaks, gutter work postponed, a cellar that takes on water in storms, a sump pump that runs, a deck found rotten, a roof assessment voted down: that is a moisture forecast written by the people who live there. A small association with a thin reserve and an old slate roof will solve its water problem out of your pocket.

Ask who holds the cellar key and how access works. If you want an inspection that includes the common cellar, the inspection window is the moment when everybody's cooperation is at its peak. It will never be easier than while the seller wants the deal to close.

What to do with what you find

A moisture finding is not automatically a reason to walk. It is a reason to price the fix and decide who pays for it. The usual moves are asking for the repair before closing with a receipt and a re-inspection, asking for a credit, asking for a price adjustment or walking away. In a hot market a seller may refuse all of them, which is information too.

Keep control of the document. You commissioned the report, so you decide whether the listing side ever sees it. Handing it over can be useful when you are asking for money. It is not something to do automatically.

Sort what you found into two piles. A downspout dumping at the foundation, a bath fan vented into the knee-wall, a valley that needs new flashing: those are repairs with an end. A cellar floor on the filled ground of the South End or East Boston, with the water table close beneath it, is a condition you manage for as long as you own the building. Both are perfectly buyable. They are not the same purchase and they should not be priced the same way.

If you are pressed to waive the inspection

It happens here and refusing outright can cost you the house. There are middle positions. Shorten the window instead of removing it. Ask for access before the offer so the inspection is done up front, which some listing agents will allow. Make the inspection informational rather than a contingency, which means you learn what you are buying but you have given up the right to renegotiate on it. Understand which of those you agreed to before you sign.

Weigh the bet against the building. Waiving on a newer townhouse with a poured foundation is a different gamble from waiving on a converted three-decker with one common cellar, a flat rear roof and three bathrooms stacked over each other. The first has one owner and one set of systems. The second has shared elements you will be paying a share of for as long as you hold the deed, whatever the inspection would have told you. Closings in Massachusetts involve attorneys. Yours is the right person to ask what a specific piece of contract language actually does.