Termite Inspection for a Home Sale

This inspection fits the moment a contract is signed and a lender, VA loan file or settlement attorney asks for a wood-destroying insect report. It is documentation, not protection, and that trade-off matters: an inspection tells you what is visible today, while a treatment and follow-up plan is what actually holds a house. If you already know you have swarmers in the basement window wells or mud tubes climbing a foundation wall, the inspection still comes first — the report defines the scope, and any treatment is quoted separately in writing afterward, with re-entry information handed to you rather than buried. If you are not selling and simply want the structure watched year to year, monitoring is the better spend; the sale report is built for the settlement file.

Baltimore's housing stock decides what the inspection actually looks like. In Fells Point, Federal Hill and Highlandtown, 19th-century brick rowhomes have floor joist ends pocketed straight into shared party walls, and many still have dirt-floor or partially dug-out cellars where soil sits inches from wood — those get careful probing with an awl along sill plates and