Should I get inspections before I list?

On the Peninsula, yes, and it is closer to standard practice than to a choice. A seller’s disclosure package — general home inspection, termite report, and usually roof and sewer lateral — is what lets a buyer write an offer without an inspection contingency, and an offer without contingencies is worth materially more than one with them. It costs around $1,000 to $2,500 all in. The reason to do it is not that it finds problems; it is that it moves the discovery of problems to a moment when you still have leverage.

What a disclosure package is

In most of the country a buyer makes an offer, then inspects, then renegotiates on what the inspector found. On the Peninsula that sequence runs backwards. The seller inspects first, publishes the reports alongside the disclosures, and buyers write offers having already read them.

A typical Palo Alto package holds:

Report	Roughly
General home inspection	$450–$1,000
Termite / wood-destroying organism report	$0–$450 — often free outside escrow
Roof inspection or certification	$150–$700
Sewer lateral camera	$200–$500
Chimney, where there is one	$75–$500

Source: House.Expert compilation of Bay Area vendor pricing, 2024–2026. Ranges, not quotes — the figure for your house depends on its size and age.

Add the preliminary title report and the natural hazard disclosure, both of which are ordered anyway, and a complete package on a typical Palo Alto house lands between about $1,000 and $2,500. Those figures sit alongside everything else on the what it costs page.

Why it is worth more than it costs

It removes the contingency. A buyer who has read a current inspection report can waive the inspection contingency without gambling. A buyer who has not read one either keeps the contingency — which means the price you agreed is provisional — or prices the unknown into their offer. Both cost you more than the inspection did.

It sets the frame. The reports on the table are the reports everyone negotiates from. When a buyer brings their own inspector afterwards, as they sometimes do, that inspector is checking your report rather than discovering the house. Those are very different conversations.

It converts a renegotiation into a price. A defect found during escrow arrives when you have a signed contract, a moving date, and a buyer who knows you have both. The same defect disclosed before offers is simply part of what everybody bid on. The item costs the same either way; the timing decides who pays for it.

And it is the cheapest disclosure insurance available. California holds a seller liable for negligently failing to disclose a material fact, not only for concealing one. A written report by a licensed inspector, delivered to every buyer, is a strong answer to a claim two years later that something should have been mentioned. See what a seller must disclose.

The objection, answered

“If I don’t look, I don’t have to disclose it.”

This is the most expensive idea in residential real estate, and it is wrong twice over.

It is wrong legally, because the buyer’s inspector will find it, and a defect found by their inspector after you declined to look is not a clean slate — it is a renegotiation in which you have no standing and no alternative offer.

And it is wrong commercially, because the discount buyers apply to an unknown is always larger than the cost of the known thing. A buyer who cannot tell whether the sewer lateral is sound assumes it is not. A report showing it is sound costs a few hundred dollars and removes the assumption. A report showing it is not lets you fix it, or price it, on your own schedule.

What inspecting does not commit you to

Finding something does not mean fixing it. Those are separate decisions, and plenty of items are better disclosed than repaired — because a buyer who is told about a deferred item and shown a bid for it usually prices it closer to the bid than to their imagination.

Which items are worth fixing, on which house, is the part that does not generalise. It depends on the buyer your house is actually competing for, and it is not the same answer on two houses on the same block. That is what to fix, and the honest version of it needs somebody standing in the room.

Timing

Order the reports before the work starts, not after. An inspection done first tells you what the preparation budget is for; an inspection done at the end tells you what you should have spent it on.

Reports go stale, too. A package more than a few months old invites the question of what has happened since, so the sequence that works is: inspect, decide, prepare, photograph, list — with the reports ordered early enough to inform the decisions and recent enough to be believed.