I think it depends on who is paying the inspector. When we bought our house, the realtor we were working with connected us with her best and most rigorous insp

I think it depends on who is paying the inspector. When we bought our house, the realtor we were working with connected us with her best and most rigorous inspector. He found fifty pages worth of stuff that was wrong, but most of them were fairly minor. We took that list back to the sellers (who were then legally required to provide a copy of that report to other future buyers), and we simply waived the little stuff. We wanted them to fix the big stuff. They didn’t want to do that, so they came down on the price by a considerable amount. He saved us tens of thousands of dollars. Now, given the problems we’ve had since then which the inspector didn’t identify, we would have paid back more than what he saved us — Except for insurance coverage. USAA is really good about paying out on claims, when many other insurance companies would weasel out. We love this house, we love this neighborhood. If we had to do it over again, I think we would have pressed harder to get even the minor problems fixed or to get the seller to come down even further on price. But I think we probably would have still bought this house. I don’t blame the inspector for anything he missed. Most of those problems were well disguised, until such time as there was an actual catastrophic failure. He couldn’t have known. If I knew his name and contact details, I would recommend him to future buyers in the Austin area. And we’re definitely sticking with USAA.