Everybody braces for the home inspection. It is the one on the calendar, the one the agent explains up front, and the one most likely to end in a list of small stuff. The reports that actually reset a negotiation are the specialty ones a buyer adds — and those arrive later, with less time left on the clock.
A note on what this post is. This is a plain-language map of the add-on reports so you are not hearing the words for the first time in an email from a buyer’s agent. We are a handyman service, not inspectors, engineers, or radon professionals — and almost nothing described below is work we do. Where a specialty is involved we have said so. Anything touching disclosure, contract deadlines, or insurance belongs to your real estate agent, and we have routed it there every time.
The umbrella report and everything under it
A general home inspection is broad and shallow by design. One person walks the whole house in one visit and writes up what is visible and accessible. That report is genuinely useful, and it is also the reason sellers get lulled: the findings are usually many, small, and cheap. Loose railing. Reversed outlet. Missing GFCI. Caulk failing at a tub. You can work through a list like that.
What a general inspector will also do, repeatedly, is recommend that somebody else look closer. A note about the sewer line. A note about the roof. A note about a crack. Those recommendations are the seam where the second wave of reports comes in, and the second wave is where the money is. Each one is ordered separately, scheduled separately, performed by a different specialist, and delivered on its own timeline — which means it lands further into the contract than the general report did, with fewer days left to do anything about it.
The general inspection tells you what is wrong. The specialty reports tell you what is expensive. Sellers plan for the first one and get surprised by the second.
The reports, one at a time
Report 01
Radon
Colorado buyers test for radon as a matter of course, and for good reason. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment states that radon is found at elevated levels in one out of every two Colorado homes. Testing here is not an unusual request; it is the default.
What the test asks of you. A short-term test needs closed-house conditions, and that part falls on whoever is living in the home. CDPHE’s instructions are to close all exterior windows and doors 12 hours before the test starts and keep them closed throughout, running the test for a minimum of 48 hours. You can come and go normally, heating and cooling can run as usual, but you cannot leave the patio door open on a warm afternoon or run a whole-house fan. In a real estate transaction, CDPHE directs sellers and buyers to hire a licensed radon measurement professional using a professional-grade continuous monitor rather than relying on a store-bought kit.
What counts as high. The EPA recommends that homes be fixed if the radon level is 4 pCi/L or more, and adds that homeowners should consider fixing between 2 and 4 pCi/L as well, because there is no known safe level of exposure.
What the fix looks like. CDPHE describes the most effective solution as a sub-slab depressurization system — in practice, a pipe drawing air from beneath the slab and a fan venting it above the roofline — or a sub-membrane system where the house sits over a crawlspace. This is a licensed specialty, not a handyman job. Radon measurement and mitigation professionals working in Colorado must be licensed by the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies, and CDPHE points consumers to DORA’s Office of Radon Professionals to verify a license. CDPHE also publishes a typical cost range for mitigation in Colorado; we are not going to quote a number here, because the right number is the one on a real bid for your house.
Sources: US EPA, “What is EPA’s Action Level for Radon and What Does it Mean?” (epa.gov/radon); Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, “Testing and mitigating your home for radon” (cdphe.colorado.gov). Both retrieved September 16, 2026. Guidance and licensing rules change — check the current pages before you rely on any of this.
Report 02
Sewer scope
This is the expensive one. A sewer scope is a camera run down the lateral — the line that carries everything from your house out to the city main — and it produces video, which is a hard thing to argue with.
What the camera finds:
- Root intrusion. Roots find joints. Cottonwoods, elms, and silver maples find them faster.
- Bellies. A section that has settled low enough to hold standing water instead of draining through.
- Offsets and separations. Joints that have shifted apart, usually from soil movement.
- Old repairs. A patch, a partial liner, or a spot fix that was done once and done poorly.
- Material itself. Clay and cast iron behave differently at fifty years old than PVC does at twenty.
Who should think about this before listing. If your home is in one of the older parts of Fort Collins, Loveland, or Greeley, and there is a mature tree between your front door and the street, the odds of a finding are not small. That is the profile where knowing first is worth the most — because a sewer repair is scheduling, excavation, and coordination, and none of that compresses well into the back half of a contract.
Report 03
Roof, and the insurability question behind it
Northern Colorado is hail country, and roofs here carry a history. What makes the roof different from the other items on this list is that it is not only an inspection question — the buyer’s insurance carrier may take an interest in the roof’s age and claim history when the buyer goes to bind a policy.
We are going to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of thing that gets stated too confidently on the internet. We cannot tell you what any carrier will or will not do, and neither can anyone who has not read that specific policy. What we can tell you is that it comes up, that it comes up more here than in most of the country, and that it is a conversation for your real estate agent and, at the right moment, the buyer’s carrier. If your roof has an age or a claim behind it, tell your agent early rather than letting it surface in week three.
Practically: find your roof’s paperwork now. Installation date, any hail claim, any insurance-funded replacement, the contractor’s name, and the warranty if there is one. A dated invoice answers a question that an inspector’s report can only raise.
Report 04
Structural and soils
Parts of the Front Range sit on expansive soils — clays that swell when they take on water and shrink when they dry. That is why a crack that a buyer from another state would shrug at gets a second look here, and why “it’s just settling” is not a sentence that ends the discussion.
When a general inspector flags something structural, the next step is usually a licensed structural engineer’s evaluation. The useful thing about that letter is that it resolves in one direction or the other. Either the engineer says the condition is cosmetic and typical, and the question closes — or the engineer describes a real condition and a remedy, and the question gets repriced against an actual scope. Both of those beat an open question, because an open question gets priced by the person on the other side of the table, and they will not price it generously.
A note on the ordinary stuff: keeping water away from the foundation is the everyday version of this. Downspout extensions that actually carry water away, grading that slopes away from the house rather than back toward it, and window wells that drain instead of holding leaves. That part is not engineering. That part is a Saturday, and it is genuinely worth doing.
Report 05
The rural ones
If your property is outside city services — unincorporated Weld or Larimer County, acreage, anything on a well — add two more reports to the list. Well inspections typically cover flow and water quality testing. Septic inspections cover the tank and the leach field, and in Colorado a transfer-of-title inspection requirement applies in many counties; your agent and the county health department will tell you exactly what yours requires, and that is the right place to ask.
A meth test also comes up occasionally, usually on a rental history or where a buyer has a specific reason to ask. It is worth knowing the test exists. It is not worth borrowing anxiety over.
This section is short on purpose. If you are on acreage, your agent has done this before and will walk you through what your county expects.
The whole list, on one screen
| Report | What it looks for | Who usually orders it | Worth pre-testing? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Radon | Indoor radon concentration under closed-house conditions | Buyer, during inspection | Ask your agent first — once you know a result, you know it |
| Sewer scope | Roots, bellies, offsets, separations, prior repairs in the lateral | Buyer, often on inspector’s recommendation | Strongest case on the list — older home, older line, big trees |
| Roof | Age, hail damage, remaining service life, claim history | Buyer; the buyer’s carrier may also weigh in | Gather your paperwork first; then ask your agent |
| Structural / soils | Movement, cracking, foundation condition in expansive soils | Buyer, after a general inspector flags it | Only if something has already been flagged or you know of a condition |
| Well | Flow rate and water quality | Buyer, on well properties | Often yes on acreage — ask your agent what is standard locally |
| Septic | Tank and leach field condition | Buyer; county rules may require it at transfer | Check your county requirement first — it may not be optional |
| Meth test | Surface contamination | Buyer, in specific circumstances | Rarely — know it exists, ask your agent if it comes up |
The last column is a starting point for a conversation with your agent, not advice. Whether pre-testing is a good idea for your house depends on your house, your market, and how disclosure works for your situation — and your agent is the one qualified to answer that.
Should you get ahead of these? The honest answer is not “all of them”
It would be easy for a company like ours to write “test everything before you list,” and it would be wrong. Pre-testing costs money you may not need to spend. And there is a second thing that matters more: once you know a result, you know it. Knowledge changes what has to be handled and how, and that is a question about disclosure — which is your agent’s area, not ours. We are not going to tell you what Colorado requires you to disclose, because getting that wrong in a blog post would be worse than saying nothing.
So the real answer is: it depends, and the person to ask is your agent. What we can offer is the shape of the decision. Pre-testing makes the most sense when two things are true at once — the odds of a finding are meaningfully above average, and the fix is slow and expensive if there is one. That is why the sewer scope on an older home with mature trees sits at the top of the list, and why a meth test sits at the bottom.
What getting ahead of it actually buys you
Not a smaller repair bill. The pipe costs what the pipe costs. What you buy is time, and what time buys is a bid instead of a guess.
Here is the mechanism. When a specialty report lands mid-contract, the buyer’s side has to attach a number to it before the deadline. They do not have your bids. They have a report, an internet search, and a reason to protect themselves — so the number they come back with is padded for their own uncertainty. When a buyer’s number is a guess, it is always the bigger number. If you already have a real quote from a real contractor in hand, you are negotiating against a document. If you do not, you are negotiating against their imagination.
Time also buys you choices that disappear under a deadline: three bids instead of one, the contractor you actually want instead of whoever is available Thursday, and the option to decide an item is not worth doing at all.
The one part of this we do handle: access
We want to be straight with you. Radon mitigation, sewer repair, roofing, structural work — none of that is inside one of our labor blocks. Those are licensed specialties, and pretending otherwise would be the wrong kind of salesmanship. What we do, when a report turns up something in a licensed trade, is arrange the specialist, coordinate the schedule, and stay your single point of contact so you are not the one managing three phone numbers during a contract.
There is one piece of this that is squarely ours, and it is the piece nobody plans for: getting the house ready to be inspected at all. An inspector who cannot reach something does not guess about it — the report says the item could not be inspected. And a buyer reading that phrase does not think “probably fine.” They think “unknown,” and unknowns get priced.
Clear these before anyone shows up with a flashlight
- Crawlspace hatch. Findable, openable, and not behind the holiday bins.
- Attic access. Clear beneath it, with room for a ladder to actually stand.
- Electrical panel. Nothing stacked in front of it, and the door opens fully.
- Water heater and furnace. Reachable on all the sides the inspector needs, with combustion air not blocked by storage.
- Sewer cleanout. Located and exposed. If yours is buried under mulch or a shrub, find it now rather than while a scope tech is standing in the driveway.
- Exterior hose bibs, meters, and the AC condenser. Not fenced in by patio furniture or overgrowth.
- Under sinks. Emptied enough to see the supply lines and the trap.
- Garage. Enough floor to walk the perimeter and reach the panel and the water shutoff.
That list is not a repair, which is exactly why it gets skipped. It is also the cheapest thing on any pre-inspection list, and it is a straightforward block-of-hours job — the kind of visit our List Ready block is sized for, especially if there is a punch list of small items to knock out in the same trip.
Common questions
What inspections do buyers order besides the general home inspection?
The general inspection is the umbrella report. Beyond it, Northern Colorado buyers commonly add a radon test, a sewer scope on older homes, a closer look at the roof, and — where something has been flagged — a structural engineer’s evaluation. On acreage outside city services, well and septic inspections are standard. Each is ordered and scheduled separately, which is why they land later in a contract than the general report does.
What is the radon action level, and what happens if we’re above it?
The EPA recommends homes be fixed at 4 pCi/L or more, and says to consider fixing between 2 and 4 pCi/L as well, since there’s no known safe level of exposure (epa.gov/radon, retrieved September 2026). Above the action level doesn’t mean unsellable — it means the conversation moves to mitigation. CDPHE describes the most effective fix as a sub-slab depressurization system, or sub-membrane over a crawlspace. Radon professionals working in Colorado must be licensed by the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies.
What does a sewer scope actually find?
Root intrusion at the joints, bellies where the line has sagged and holds water, offsets and separations from soil movement, and previous repairs that were done badly. Older neighborhoods with clay or cast-iron laterals and mature trees are where it matters most. It’s the most expensive surprise on this list and it tends to arrive late, when there’s no time left to shop bids.
Should I test before listing, or wait and see what the buyer orders?
Not always — and this one genuinely belongs to your agent. Pre-testing costs money, and once you know a result you know it, which affects how disclosure is handled. What pre-testing reliably buys is time and a real bid instead of someone else’s estimate. The case is strongest where the odds of a finding are high and the fix is slow and expensive: an older home with a clay lateral and big trees is the clearest example.
Why does “unable to inspect” matter so much?
Because an inspector who can’t reach something doesn’t guess — the report says so. A blocked crawlspace hatch, a panel behind boxes, a furnace walled in by storage. A buyer reading “unable to inspect” doesn’t assume it’s fine; they assume it’s an open question, and open questions get priced by the other side. Moving the boxes is the cheapest thing on any pre-inspection list.
Before the inspector pulls up
Make Sure They Can Actually Get To It
Buyer ordering a scope or a radon test? We’ll make sure everything’s accessible before they show up — crawlspace, attic, panel, water heater, cleanout — and knock out the small punch-list items while we’re there. If the report turns up something in a licensed trade, we’ll arrange the specialist, coordinate the schedule, and stay your point of contact. Pre-Listing Pros is a family-run pre-listing service in Northern Colorado, and the consultation is free. List Ready is $499 flat for a block of skilled labor; you buy any fixtures, we bring the everyday supplies. Serving Fort Collins, Loveland, Greeley, Windsor, and across Northern Colorado.