Today, I filled out a disclosure form as part of the process of selling my home.

The form asked a lot of good questions -- many of which were about defects and conditions a buyer would want to know about. For example, the form had several questions about water penetration in the basement, past roof repairs, and so on. What the form did not have, however, was any mechanism for alerting the buyer of problems that a typical homeowner would not have known about.

Because I have been active in the home inspection industry for nearly 20 years, I had some special insight as to the condition of my home that I included in an addendum to disclosure form.

In fact, the extras disclosure I made would be important to any buyer.

If I had been an average seller whose expertise was accounting, computers, bar tending, or anything other than civil engineering or inspection, the buyer of my home would not have learned of its "blemishes" from my disclosure form. The point is not that other owners would have been dishonest, but rather that their areas of expertise are simply elsewhere.

Seller's disclosure forms vary from state to state, but they all share the same problem -- owner's can only know what they know.

I am an advocate of seller disclosure forms. There are often conditions that a buyer may have failed to learn of, if not for a disclosure form, but these forms cannot possibly substitute for a professional home inspection.

Do I have an unfounded prejudice in this matter? Or are my views the result of experience? I think my reasoning here is good, so let me explain:

Most of the serious defects a professional home inspector identifies are unknown to the seller. A common home inspector's lament relates to the seller whose 35-year old roof has outlasted its 25 year design life by ten years. When the home inspector concludes that such roofing needs replacement, the owner invariably says, "Whaddaya mean the roof's no good! We've lived here for 30 years and we've never had a roof leak -- that roof's never even needed maintenance!"

It's not an issue of deception, but that seller -- not unreasonably -- would never have included the roof as a known problem on their disclosure form.

Defects that materially impact the safety and habitability of a home are even more likely to have escaped the knowledge of the seller. For instance, approximately 5 percent of all the homes we've inspected have an immediate safety defect related to either the chimney or the heater venting. Do seller's know about such problems? Rarely, if ever. Are such problems serious? Potentially, yes. Should buyers be concerned? Certainly.

A good home inspector looks in places that the homeowner never goes, and looks with a degree of expertise that owners rarely have. How many owners have crawled through their crawl spaces in the past five years ? How many have climbed to the top of their roofs to look down the chimney with a halogen flashlight?

The prudent home buyer demands a seller's disclosure form, reads it carefully, asks follow-up questions of the seller -- and then provides the form to his or her home inspector.

For more articles by Andrew Kleeman, please press here.

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Copyright 2001 Andrew Kleeman. Posted by Realty Times with permission.

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Published: March 16, 2001

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.