The standard real estate contract used in Oregon has a home inspection contingency where a buyer will take the time to inspect the home to make sure they are satisfied with the condition of the home. Buyers are not going to have a home inspection done until they are engaged in a contract with you. If the potential buyer finds anything in the home inspection they object to, they have the right to pull out of the contract. You can loose valuable marketing time by being tied up in a contract that might fail.

While your home will still be marketed during the inspection process, buyers are not interested in looking at homes under contract. Many transactions fall apart because of home inspection reports and negotiation of repairs. As a seller, you need to decide if you want to know what defects you have in your home, as most homes have some type of defect, and repair them ahead of time, or wait and see what happens at home inspection time.

Typically, the buyer will ask you to fix the problems found by their inspector or they will terminate the contract. If you do not want to fix the needed repairs, then they may ask for a price reduction or a credit at closing. If the buyer terminates the contract, then you will have to put the house back on the market and deal with the stigma of a sale fail. Any defects that came up on the inspection report must be disclosed by Oregon law as they are material defects.

When preparing your house for sale, you are going to do lots of things to make it more appealing to potential buyers. You are going to clean up the yard, apply a fresh coat of paint where needed, get rid of all clutter in and around the house, have the kitchen and all bathrooms thoroughly cleaned, clean the carpets, clean all windows, etc. A pre-listing home inspection will help you find out about any repairs before your home is put on the market. By making this investment on the front end of a transaction, the chances of problems coming up during the inspection process are greatly reduced. You should consider a pre-listing home inspection as part of the preparation process.