What I look at first on a walkthrough
By Dan Jones ·
Bottom line: start at the road, not the kitchen. Look at where the ground meets the building and whether water runs away from the foundation, then where the roof water goes, then what the driveway says about the ground underneath. After that, sight the roofline for a sag, and work out what the last owner spent money on, because people renovate what they look at and good owners renovate what they do not. The kitchen tells you almost nothing about what a house will cost you. None of this replaces an inspection, it just tells you whether a property is worth paying an inspector to look at.
I am Dan Jones, a REALTOR with Royal LePage Locations West in Penticton, licence number 1118346. Twenty-four years building houses, from 1980, before I was licensed in 2004, which is where this order of operations comes from.
I do not start inside. I start at the road.
Twenty-four years of building homes gave me an order of operations for looking at one, and it runs roughly opposite to how most people tour a house. Buyers start in the kitchen. The kitchen tells you almost nothing about what a house is going to cost you.
First: the grade
Stand at the street and look at where the ground meets the building. Water should run away from the foundation on every side. If the lot slopes toward the house, or a patio was poured level with no fall on it, you are looking at the single most expensive category of problem in this valley.
It is unglamorous, it is visible before you walk through the door, and almost nobody looks at it.
Where the roof water goes is the other half, and the cheapest half to fix. Newer homes tie the downspouts into underground drainage; older ones discharge at grade and depend on extensions to carry water clear of the building. With tied-in systems I am watching for water surfacing or pooling near a downspout, which suggests the line below is blocked, collapsed or root-filled. Common on old clay tile and invisible until it backs up. With the older style I am looking at whether the extensions are there at all, because they get pulled off for mowing and never put back. Roof water landing against a foundation is where most of the expensive problems on this list begin.
The driveway is part of this. It is the largest flat surface on the property and it reports on the ground underneath before the house does. Surface crazing in asphalt and hairline shrinkage in concrete are age. Cracks that step or offset, sections that have dropped, or water pooling where it should be running away suggest something below. Fill that was never properly compacted on a cut-and-fill hillside lot, erosion carrying material out from under the slab, or movement on a slope. That is a question to ask rather than a verdict, but it is worth asking before you write an offer, not after.
Second: the roofline
Not the shingles. The line. Sight along the ridge and the fascia. A sag tells you something structural is moving, or moved once and was patched. Look at the valleys, where two roof planes meet, because that is where water concentrates and where failures start.
Shingle age is a number you can get from a seller. A bad roofline is a conversation with an engineer.
Third: where the money went
Walk through and ask what the last owner spent money on. A new kitchen and an original furnace tells you one thing. A new furnace, new hot water tank, new service line and a dated kitchen tells you something completely different, and the second house is usually the better buy.
People renovate what they look at. Good owners renovate what they do not.
Fourth: the systems, by era
The age of a house tells you what to look for before you look. I run the same short list on every older property, and I say what I find out loud while we are standing there.
All of it by eye, without touching anything. I do not open panels, operate valves, pull back insulation or go poking in an attic. That is not caution for its own sake. A REALTOR® is not a home inspector, and some of what is on this list is actively hazardous to disturb. What I am doing is reading what is visible and telling you what it suggests. What it means gets confirmed by someone whose job that is.
Plumbing. Poly B went in from roughly the late 1970s through the late 1990s. Galvanized steel came before that, pre-mid-1970s, and corrodes from the inside out. Both are now insurance questions as much as plumbing ones, and a house that is hard to insure is hard to finance.
Electrical service. Sixty amps was normal before about 1950 and will not carry modern loads. Many insurers want it upgraded to 100 before they will write a policy.
Attic insulation. Vermiculite, sold as Zonolite up to 1990, can contain asbestos. It is recognisable on sight from the hatch, loose pebbly flakes, grey-brown to silvery gold, sitting like coarse gravel rather than batts or blown fibre, and once you have seen it you do not forget it. Looking is fine. Nobody should be climbing in or disturbing it, and if it matters, a qualified professional takes the sample.
Roof. Type, age and what it is doing from the ground. Curling shingle edges and heavy granule loss are the clearest end-of-life signals. Insurers care about roof age, so it affects what a buyer can get covered as well as what they will be spending.
Aluminium branch wiring. Roughly 1965 to 1978. The remedy is usually pigtailing by a licensed electrician, and the buyer’s insurer will want the paperwork.
Wood stove or fireplace insert. Expect the insurer to want a current WETT report, often less than a year old. Worth knowing before subjects are removed.
Tape on the furnace ducting. White or grey cloth-like tape at duct joints and elbows, or chalky moulded insulation on pipe fittings, can contain asbestos in houses of that era. Intact, it is not doing anything. Fraying or hanging is a different matter, and replacing the heating system later means abatement.
Retaining walls, on any slope. Anything over about four feet should have been engineered. I look for leaning, bulging, stepped cracking and soil washing through. It is nearly always the drainage behind the wall failing rather than the wall, which is why one can stand for twenty years and then move in a single wet spring.
Heating history. If the house ever ran on oil, where is the tank? Above ground, or buried in the yard and forgotten? A leaking buried tank contaminates soil, and liability in BC can follow past owners as well as present ones. This is the one that can cost more than everything else combined.
Hot water tank. Look at the label. A tank at the end of its life is cheap to replace and expensive to have fail.
None of these are reasons not to buy a house. They are reasons to know the number before you write the offer instead of after the inspection.
And none of it replaces the inspection. I can see that a house is of the era for poly B; an inspector can tell you what is actually behind the wall. The value of the walkthrough version is timing. You learn it before you are emotionally committed and before you have written a price.
If you are on the other side of this and preparing your own home to sell, the same list from the seller’s side is here.
Fifth: the things that are cheap to fix
Paint, flooring, fixtures, cabinet fronts, landscaping. These read as problems and they are not. If a house is being discounted for cosmetics, that is a discount you can capture. If a house shows beautifully and the grade is wrong, you are paying a premium to inherit a bill.
Why this matters before you write an offer
Every item above is a number. Not a vague worry. A quotable cost with a rough timeline attached.
A roof at end of life, a 60 amp service an insurer wants upgraded, aluminium wiring that has never been remediated, a wood stove with no current WETT report: each one is something the next owner pays for, and each one is legitimately part of what the house is worth.
That is the difference between hearing about a problem and pricing one. A buyer who knows before writing can put a realistic number on paper and explain it. A buyer who finds out at subject removal is renegotiating a deal they are already attached to, from a weaker position, against a seller who now feels ambushed.
It works the same way on the other side of the table. Sellers who know what is in their own house set the price. Sellers who do not, defend it.
None of this is about finding fault to drive a number down. It is about the offer reflecting the house that is actually there.
What this is and is not
This is not a home inspection. Get an inspection, always. What this is, is the thing that happens before an inspection: deciding whether a property is worth the money and the time to inspect at all.
I do this out loud, on site, with buyers listening. It is a habit from the job site and I have never found a reason to stop. A house you understand is a house you can decide about.