Ask an Inspector: What Seattle Homes Hide (a Composite Interview)
A Q&A with a composite Seattle home inspector: moisture, side sewers, roofs, crawl spaces, and the questions buyers should actually ask during an inspection.
This interview is a composite, drawn from common professional knowledge about home inspection in the Seattle area — not a conversation with one specific person. The questions are ones real buyers ask; the answers reflect what inspectors here say over and over.
Seattle buyers often get less than two hours with their inspector, sometimes squeezed into a pre-offer window before a review date. So we put the questions a buyer would actually ask to a composite Seattle inspector and kept the answers blunt.
”What’s the first thing you look at in a Seattle house?”
Water. Almost everything that goes seriously wrong with a Puget Sound home traces back to moisture — how it lands on the house, how it moves around the house, and where it ends up. I check the roofline, the gutters, the downspouts, and where the downspouts discharge before I’m even inside. A downspout dumping water against the foundation tells me where to look next: the crawl space directly below it.
”What do you find in crawl spaces here?”
Standing water in the rainy season, soaked or fallen insulation, vapor barriers that stop two feet short of the walls, and the occasional rodent metropolis. None of those automatically kill a deal. What matters is whether the moisture is a drainage problem you can fix outside — regrading, extending downspouts, adding a footing drain — or a sign that water has been sitting against wood framing for years. Buyers fixate on the smell; I’m looking at the posts and beams for rot and at the soil for signs of regular ponding.
”Everyone says ‘get a sewer scope.’ Do you agree?”
Yes, and I say that as someone who doesn’t do them — it’s a separate specialist with a camera. Seattle’s older neighborhoods sit on side sewers that can be eighty-plus years old: concrete or clay pipe, sometimes cracked, often invaded by roots. The side sewer is the homeowner’s responsibility all the way to the city main, and replacement can run well into five figures. A scope costs a tiny fraction of that. On any house older than about 1980, skipping it is false economy. We wrote a full explainer on this: why a sewer scope matters in Seattle.
”How worried should I be about an older roof?”
Less about age, more about evidence. A twenty-year-old composition roof that’s been maintained, has intact flashing, and shows no moss carpet can be fine for years. A ten-year-old roof under fir trees with clogged gutters and moss lifting the shingle edges can already be leaking. In this climate, moss is the tell — it holds water against the shingles and pries them up. I also look in the attic for staining on the sheathing, because the underside of the roof tells the truth the topside hides.
”What do buyers panic about that usually doesn’t matter?”
Hairline cracks in concrete, fogged double-pane windows, and an aging water heater. All real, all routine, all cheap relative to the price of the house. Foggy windows mean a failed seal, not a failed house. Conversely, the things buyers shrug at — slow drainage at the foundation, amateur electrical work in the panel, bouncy floors over a damp crawl space — are the ones I wish they’d take seriously.
”What can’t you see?”
Plenty, and an honest inspector says so. I can’t see inside walls, under installed flooring, or behind the seller’s storage shelving. I can’t see the side sewer (that’s the scope), buried oil tanks (that’s a tank locator), or whether the remodel was permitted (that’s a permit-history search). An inspection is a visual snapshot of accessible areas on one day — incredibly useful, never exhaustive.
”If a buyer can only follow you around for twenty minutes, where should they spend it?”
The crawl space hatch, the electrical panel, the water heater and furnace, and the attic access. That’s where the expensive systems and the moisture stories live. Skip the twenty minutes admiring the kitchen — you already saw the kitchen. And read the report that night, not the morning your inspection contingency expires.
”What should buyers ask that they almost never do?”
“What would you fix first, and what would you just watch?” A report can list forty items and they are not remotely equal. Most inspectors will happily triage: here are the two things to price out now, here are the five to handle in year one, here’s the stuff that’s just an old house being an old house. For the full system-by-system rundown of what we check, see what Seattle inspectors actually look at.
”One last thing buyers should remember?”
The inspection isn’t pass/fail. Every house — including new construction — generates a list. Your job isn’t to find a house with a clean report; it’s to understand the report well enough to know what you’re buying and what it’ll cost to own.
An inspector tells you about the house. Your agent’s fee structure tells you something about your agent — and in Seattle, those fees vary more than most buyers realize. Manaky Homes is a free marketplace where local agents publish their pricing side by side; get on the waitlist to compare before you commit.
