Simplifying your property purchase: How a simple act could save you money and speed up your real estate journey

Home buyers and sellers face a laundry list of costs on their real estate journeys, but one of the common expenses that’s hard to predict are building and pest inspection reports. A building and pest inspection report is a professional assessment of a property’s structural condition and any pest-related issues that’s designed to uncover potential problems before a sale. A single report typically can cost upwards of $500, and home buyers tend to buy a report for every home that they are keen to put an offer on.

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videojs);For buyers who have missed out on properties, these costs could total into thousands of dollars. But businesses like Before You Buy (BYB) have been flipping the script, offering a shared-cost model that can potentially save money for buyers and boost transparency for sellers. BYB co-founder and chief executive Rhys Rogers said he and his brother Jordan started the business in 2015 after seeing the need to reduce the cost of such reports first-hand.

"I was seeing different interested buyers in a property purchasing what was essentially the same report multiple times, and all the time and money wasted with the process,” Mr Rogers said. Due diligence is important for home buyers because it can protect them from unnecessary surprises such as building defaults and pest infestations. Building and pest inspections assess a property's structural condition and any pest-related issues in a report that's designed to uncover potential problems before a purchase.

Picture: GettyThat’s why buyers were often advised to commission building, pest, and strata reports before making an offer. However, if a buyer was unsuccessful in buying a property, then the money was gone. Under the BYB approach, the cost of an inspection report on a particular home could be shared among multiple home buyers to reduce the individual cost.

"The more people that buy that report, the cheaper that report gets," Mr Rogers said. "We give cash back to earlier buyers, so everyone pays the same amount." But the benefits extended beyond buyers.

Sellers were increasingly using BYB to make their properties more attractive. By providing reports upfront, they removed a major barrier for potential bidders. "Buyers were looking at properties with our reports first because it was easy," Mr Rogers said.

"They had everything in place so that I can bid with confidence." For sellers, the reports provided transparency that meant more competitive offers. "If there are issues with the property, the sellers have an opportunity to fix those issues before going to market," Mr Rogers said.

"It’s about risk mitigation and increasing the number of people interested in your property." As Australians come to expect better experiences in their real estate journeys, BYB and other innovators continue to find new ways to simplify and reduce costs for home buyers and sellers. The post Simplifying your property purchase: How a simple act could save you money and speed up your real estate journey appeared first on realestate.

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