This was never about what's broken. Every property is hiding three, maybe four small fixes standing between the asking price and the appraised price. Find those. Skip the rest. The seller keeps their number. The buyer walks into nothing left to discover. The appraiser gets to say yes without stretching for it. Minimum work. Maximum leverage. Paid when the deal closes — not before.
It's about leverage. One coat of waterproofing. One box of smoke detectors. One scraped-and-repainted window sill. Small enough a seller barely notices the cost, big enough an appraiser can point straight at it and justify the number. Do the least it takes. Prove the most it's worth. The buyer gets a home with nothing hidden. The seller gets the price they asked for. That's not a slogan. That's the whole strategy.
Find out what needs fixing while it's still on your schedule, not a loan deadline. Nothing is due until closing.
Make the pre-list inspection part of your standard listing checklist. Fewer surprises at underwriting, fewer renegotiated deals.
Keystone is a contract structure, not a franchise. Run your own inspection, write your own fee into the purchase contract, collect it at the table.
Due at the time of inspection. The fee rides in the contract and settles at the closing table.
Typical bump an appraiser can justify off a handful of small, targeted capital improvements.
The average delay a post-offer inspection adds to closing — avoided when repairs are made up front.
This basement is from an actual pre-list inspection. One coat of waterproofing. Nothing gutted, nothing rebuilt. Drag the slider. Then click through the other three items that carry the same weight for the same reason: least effort, most leverage.
Sharon the seller signed. Her agent did their part. The buyer's agent did theirs. Sharon was just waiting — then the bank mandated an inspection before it would approve the loan.
From offer accepted to loan cleared, when three simple things surface after the fact and have to be fixed under deadline.
Same inspection, same bank requirement — but the report comes back clean because the work was already done.
This works because it's written into the contract, not because anyone's owed a favor. Here's the shape of it.
Same scope as the bank's inspector will run later — structural, electrical, safety, moisture. The seller and agent see it before a buyer ever does.
Smoke detectors, peeling trim, a basement waterproofing pass — the small items that stall a closing get handled on the seller's timeline, not the buyer's deadline.
It's written into the listing agreement as a line item payable at closing — for the inspector, same as everyone else at the table.
In Michigan, a pre-listing inspection isn't state-mandated. That's the point: nobody is forcing a seller to find out what's wrong before a buyer's bank does. Where it isn't required, the sellers, agents, and inspectors who get ahead of it are the ones who don't get stalled by it later.