Bad Termite Inspections

If you financed the purchase of your home, your lender required that you have the home inspected for termites. This is a long standing practice in the industry because termites and their damage are not readily obvious to a lay person, and because your homeowner’s insurance will not cover termite damage. A lender does not want to finance a purchase that may be worth less than the amount loaned with no insurance to correct any problems.

A home lender wants to know two things:

1) Does the house have live termites?

2) Are there any CONDUCIVE CONDITIONS ( conditions that are inviting to termites and can actually promote infestation) to infestation present?

If the answer to either of the above questions is “YES”, then the home lender will not fund the loan. BUT WAIT! If the house is treated after a finding of live termites, it is deemed to be termite “free” by the home lender. If Conducive Conditions are found but are corrected, then the loan will fund. So in the end, the home lender has a couple of straightforward concerns about the property they will be funding, but they also are very easily appeased.

What a Termite Inspector Looks For

When an inspector looks at a house, his job is to note visible evidence of the following:

1) An ACTIVE INFESTATION (meaning a live infestation);

2) A PREVIOUS INFESTATION;

3) PREVIOUS TREATMENT for termites;

4) CONDUCIVE CONDITIONS for termite infestation.

In reality, they are required to look for other wood destroying insects in these categories, but far and away the most destructive are subterranean termites.

How a Termite Inspection Should Be Performed

As a homebuyer, you expect the termite inspector to find live termites if they are there. If the house you just bought has live termites or what is known in the pest control industry as an “active infestation”, then the odds are pretty strong that you didn’t buy the home knowing or believing you had a problem. So how did this happen to you? Were you deceived, mislead or given false information by your inspector? It’s possible. There are several factors involved. First, how substantial is the infestation? If there is considerable damage and the pests have been present for more than a couple of years, then the easy answer is that your inspector probably could have and should have found evidence of the infestation. If the activity is more recent and there are no signs of previous infestation or treatment by the preceding homeowner, then you may be the unfortunate victim of nature and bad timing. However, that is rarely the case. As a defense attorney for dozens of pest control companies, I have seen first hand how poorly inspections are performed.

It became obvious that in the vast majority of inspections, if the termites didn’t come out from behind the walls and introduce themselves, the inspector wouldn’t find them.