When you're buying or building a home, you'll absolutely have a much better experience if you use different inspection services. There simply is too much money on the line for you to hope everything is going to be okay, either in the existing home you're buying or the new home your builder is constructing. Home-inspection services cover a gambit of different specialties. You can hire an overall building inspector, a structural inspector who has a professional engineering license, a certified water inspector, a pest inspector, etc. It's best to make sure you hire an inspector that has the highest level of certification.

Inspection testing services are usually very easy to locate. If you're buying an existing home, realtors often know different inspectors. But always keep in mind that an inspector is called a different name by some licensed real-estate agents. They often call them deal killers. If an inspection uncovers many defects, or plants in the mind of the buyer all sorts of future expenses, the negotiations of buying the home can blow up. When that happens, the real-estate agent has to start all over on a different home. You can see how an unethical realtor would be inclined to suggest an inspector that had poor credentials or is known to do a low-quality inspection.

It's easy to do searches on the Internet to discover all of the inspection testing services you might need. I did this myself on the house I purchased in New Hampshire. Within minutes, I found a local inspector who had the best inspection credentials from the most-respected home-inspection association in the USA.

Building-inspection services are almost always handled by a local government agency. Building inspectors exist to promote the public health and safety. Without laws covering building practices and minimum construction requirements, the quality of houses would be highly suspect. Natural disasters, like earthquakes, routinely bring this to the forefront. You'll hear about building collapses that were caused by the lack of building inspectors or corruption when in comes to government building-inspection services.

If your new home is going to be a sizable investment, it really pays to have an independent home-inspection service look at the house at different times during the construction process. I feel the most important inspections are:

• soil inspection
• foundation inspection - structural and to ensure it's square
• rough framing
• electrical and plumbing
• insulation and air infiltration
• heating and cooling system
• roofing - including flashings
• grading and drainage

You can't always count on the building inspector that works for the local government to do a thorough job on all these inspections. They have their own set of priorities as well as a workload of job sites to visit each day. Rarely can they spend an hour or two each time at your new home.

There are a number of different national and state associations that certify inspectors. It's very important that you spend lots of time going over the requirements that an inspector must fulfill to get a certificate that allows him to place a fancy acronym behind his name.

If you invest time investigating property inspection services, and the associations that represent them, you'll discover that it doesn't take much effort at all to get a certificate. In some instances, you just have to take a few free quick online tests and agree to some other terms. Do this and make a credit-card payment, and you're certified!

On the other hand, you'll discover that some who do real estate inspection services have to go through rigorous training, education and even periodic continuing education to qualify and maintain their certification. I used an inspector like this for my home in New Hampshire.

Take your time when deciding which inspection services you'll use. This is the last place you want to cut corners. Remember that if a defect shows up at a later date that isn't covered by a warranty, or the builder / previous homeowner will not fix it, then you have to repair the defect at your own cost or disclose it to the next person who buys your home. Imagine having a list of these defects all because you didn't think it was smart to spend a few hundred dollars on a top-notch inspection service. Please don't make that mistake.