Real estate agents across the country have to comply with an endless sea of issues when trying to sell residential and commercial properties on an open market. These challenges include things like finding a good buyer, keeping unoccupied properties in presentable condition, and meeting countless local, state, and federal regulations for selling a property.
Finding the right buyer at the right time for the right property can be troublesome enough on its own. However, most property buyers are going to need some assurances that the investment they’re about to make is sound and that the property is free of major issues that could cause them harm or financial loss.
Moisture meters can be a tool for real estate agents that helps them help their customers. How so?
Here are a few different ways that using moisture meters to inspect a building prior to making a sale can help:
1: Identifying Moisture Intrusion Sources
When moisture gets into building materials, it can cause extensive damage over time if the source of the moisture is not found and remediated. Simply removing the moisture doesn’t work if more is able to get inside at the source.
Moisture meters can help real estate agents (or the building inspectors they hire) pinpoint the origin point where moisture is getting into the structure. With this information, the real estate agent can find the moisture intrusion source and have it fixed so no new moisture can get in the building.
This helps keep moisture damage from getting worse, and allows real estate agents to prevent many other water damage issues.
2: Preventing Mold Growth
Mold can grow in almost any structure so long as there’s enough moisture and nutrients present. Damp, dark areas of a structure are often prone to growing mold, which can rot wooden structures and even create respiratory risks for the building’s occupants.
By using a moisture meter, you can identify building materials that are at risk of developing mold and dry them out (or remove them) as necessary to prevent such growth.
3: Ensuring That Building Materials Are Sound
Over time, excess moisture in building materials can weaken key structural components. This can lead to failures in the structure that cause sagging or cracks that lower the building’s value. In some flooring materials, such as hardwood floors, excess moisture causes swelling that can damage the floors.
4: Preserving the Building’s Long-Term Resale Value
The different types of water damage caused by undetected moisture sources can all have a severe long-term effect on the resale value of the property. Extensive water damage can virtually gut a building, rendering it almost unusable—and thus un-resalable—for the buyer.
This is not a desired outcome for most real estate agents because it can affect their professional reputations and their ability to close future sales. By checking for excess moisture in property prior to selling it, real estate agents can minimize their risk of selling a building that will lose resale value because of water damage.
5: Preventing Costly Post-Purchase Repairs
If water damage has caused major damage to a structure, any buyers will, naturally, have to fix it before they can put the property to use safely. However, water damage restoration work can be costly, and it takes a significant amount of time and effort to complete.
The cost of the repairs can be off-putting on their own, but the delays they force on clients can be just as problematic. As such, many real estate buyers appreciate when real estate agents have performed a thorough inspection of the building to check for possible problems before the purchase.
So, in a way, using a moisture meter for building inspection doesn’t just help your customers, it helps protect your reputation and ability to close deals with wary buyers.
Need a moisture meter for inspecting building materials? Check out Delmhorst’s top-of-the-line moisture meters right now, or learn more about using moisture meters in our Guide to Measuring Moisture in Restoration.
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