Does A Home Inspection Cover Pests In Ohio?

Usually not. Ohio's standards of practice for licensed home inspectors say an inspector is not required to determine whether animals are present at a property, and the wood destroying insect report a lender orders is limited to insects that damage wood. Mice, cockroaches and bed bugs sit in the space between those two documents, and nobody is assigned to it.

What Ohio's Rules Let An Inspector Skip

Ohio licenses home inspectors, and Ohio Administrative Code 1301:17-1-17 is where the job gets defined. Paragraph (C) describes it as a visual and not technically exhaustive examination of readily accessible components and systems, and says the inspector does not have to identify concealed conditions or latent defects. Paragraph (E)(10) is the one that matters here: a licensee is not required to determine or offer an opinion about the presence of animals at the property. Rodents and insects are animals. Paragraph (E)(11) adds that the inspector does not have to evaluate how well any installed system for controlling or removing animals is working, so the bait stations along the back of the garage are not theirs to grade either.

None of that stops an inspector from telling you what they saw, and plenty of good ones do. Paragraph (D) holds them to it: a licensee who elects to comment on an excluded item may not do so in a careless or misleading manner. The practical lesson is about silence. A report with no pests in it means the inspector did not write about pests. That is a different sentence from there are no pests.

The Termite Report Answers One Question, Narrowly

When a lender is involved, a second document usually joins the file. The NPMA-33 wood destroying insect inspection report, published by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, is the output of a real estate wood destroying insect inspection, and it records whether there was visible evidence of wood destroying insects, and visible damage from them, in the accessible areas on the day of the visit. Our guide to reading each block of that form covers what the boxes actually commit the inspector to.

The limit is in the name. Wood destroying insects means termites, carpenter ants, carpenter bees, powderpost beetles and the old house borer. A cockroach population under the kitchen sink does not appear on that form. Neither does a mouse run through a joist bay, because a mouse is not eating the structure, it is living in it.

Three Documents, Three Different Jobs

Buyers tend to assume the paperwork overlaps. It does not. Each of these answers its own question and stops.

What To Look For On Your Own Walkthrough

You get a second showing, usually a final walkthrough, and sometimes a slow hour while somebody measures for curtains. Spend part of it low to the ground. That is where the evidence sits, and it is exactly where nobody looks while they are picturing the furniture.

• Open the cabinet under every sink. Droppings, chewed corners and the gap where the drain line passes through the wall all read in about four seconds.
• Look at the sill plate in the basement or crawl space, where the wood sits on the block. Mud tubes about the width of a pencil are the one termite sign a non-expert can recognize on sight.
• Check the windowsills in the rooms nobody uses. Dead cluster flies, lady beetles and discarded insect wings collect there and stay for months.
• Look behind the refrigerator and the range if the appliances are staying with the house.
• Scan the garage corners and the back of the water heater closet for droppings, and for the dark smears rodents leave along a route they use every night.
• If a mattress or a bed frame is being left behind, check the seams and the screw heads before you agree to keep it. Our room by room check covers where they actually hide.
• Walk the outside once. Firewood stacked against the siding, mulch heaped over the top of the foundation and a downspout emptying at the footer are conditions rather than pests, but they describe the next two years fairly well.

An empty house is harder to read than a lived-in one, not easier. There is no food out and no routine to interrupt, so a population with nothing to eat goes quiet instead of going away. Read a vacant house as less information rather than as a clean result.

You Found Something Before Closing

Get it identified before anybody writes it into a document. Winged insects on a window well in spring are a coin flip between termite swarmers and flying ants, and droppings in a basement corner could belong to a mouse, a rat or a bat, which are three different conversations. Termite and bed bug inspections are free, and for anything else it is a free estimate. What you want out of it is written findings inside your inspection period: what is there, whether it is still active, and what ending it takes.

What that does to your contract is a question for your agent or a real estate attorney, not for a pest control company. On the other side of the same closing table, the seller is filling out Ohio's Residential Property Disclosure Form, which asks one question about wood destroying insects and caps the description of any inspection or treatment at the past five years. We have written up what that form reaches and what it does not if you want to know what the other party was asked.

If what you found is rodent droppings, leave them alone until the house is actually yours, then follow the CDC sequence rather than the obvious one. The CDC says not to vacuum or sweep droppings, urine or nesting material, because that puts tiny droplets into the air. Wear rubber or plastic gloves, spray the material until it is very wet with a bleach solution of one part bleach to ten parts water or with an EPA-registered disinfectant, let it sit five minutes, wipe it up with paper towels, and put the towels in a covered garbage can. Mop or sponge the area afterward.

The First Month After You Get The Keys

Moving week is the easiest time to fix the things that let pests in, because the house is empty, the basement is clear and nothing has been pushed against a wall yet.

1. Seal before you unpack. A mouse gets through a gap about the size of a dime, and the garage door corners, the dryer vent and the utility penetrations are where they usually are. The sequence and the materials that hold up are in our guide to how mice get into an Ohio house.
2. Look at the attic and the crawl space once, properly. They are the two places a showing never covers and the two places that tell you the most.
3. Watch the first warm week and the first cold snap. Both move things. Insects that overwintered in a wall come out on a warm spell, and rodents push in when the ground temperature drops.
4. Write down what you see, with dates. Two sightings in a week in the same room is a pattern. One sighting in October is a visitor.

Buying or selling in North Canton, Canton, Hartville, Massillon or anywhere else across Stark, Summit, Portage, Wayne and Tuscarawas counties, and want somebody to read the house for pests before you sign? Request a free inspection through our inspection request or call 330-494-6199. We will tell you in writing what is there, which is the version a lender, an agent or an attorney can actually use.