9 reasons NOT to do a home inspection yourself.

Reason #1: You are not trained/qualified! 

Comprehensive Home inspections require knowledge across multiple engineering disciplines: civil, electrical, structural, plumbing to name a few. Unless you are trained in all of these disciplines, you better leave it to an expert.

Reason #2: You do not have the tools! 
Home Inspections require the use of many tools to better judge the quality of the home. These include (and are not limited to) clamp meters, moisture meters, fault detectors, IR thermometers, Thermal Cameras etc. Unless you possess these tools and know how to use them, leave home inspections to the experts.

Reason #3: You don’t have the experience! 
Home inspection is a specialized profession. Seasoned home inspectors have experience of 100s of inspections across various projects, meaning that they know where to focus! You, as an amateur home inspector albeit for your own home, do not stand a chance in comparison. 

Reason #4: You don’t have the stamina! 
Home inspections are detailed and back breaking processes.   For example, when evaluating flooring to find hollow tile, a typical house having hundreds of tiles each of which have to be examined in detail.  It is back breaking indeed – do you think you are up for it?

Reason #5: You don’t do this for a living! 
For trained and certified home inspectors, performing home inspections is a piece of cake as it is their core competency. They do this for a living. What about you? The fact that you don’t do this for a living means that you will potentially miss out on finding issues.

Reason #6: You don’t have the time! 
Typically It takes two trained home inspectors 3 hours to perform the inspection of a 1200 square feet home. A non expert will take multiple days for a home of a similar dimension if he does the same high quality job that a trained inspector does. Do you think you will be able to spend 2-3 complete days performing an inspection?

Reason #7: Your inspection report will be shoddy! 
Typically home inspectors use a mobile app to perform the inspection and churn out a well formatted report with photos, annotations, text etc that builders can easily understand. Since you will have to compile the report manually, the look and feel of the report will not be professional enough and might lead to the builder not taking you or your report seriously. 

Reason #8: You won’t use language that the builder will understand! 
The reports that home inspectors use have industry specific jargon for the issues that the builder understands. If you don’t use such terminology in the report the chances are that the builder will not take you seriously or misinterpret the issue.  

Last but not the least.

Reason #9: You may miss issues!! 
This is the most important reason that you should NOT perform an inspection yourself. The goal of an inspection is to find issues so that you can get them fixed before you move in – a stitch in time saves nine. Since the chances of you missing issues are relatively higher, the consequences are pretty expensive in the long run. Any money you save by conducting the inspection yourself will be offset by the time and money that you might need to spend in the near future, if an issue that you failed to catch becomes critical.