Pre-listing inspection
Find out what the buyer's inspector will find. Before they do.
A pre-listing inspection and repair plan for North Shore sellers — so you know what to fix, what to disclose, and what to leave alone before your home goes on the market.
Licensed by Consumer Protection BC · Reports within 24 hours · Friday–Sunday appointments
Most sales don't fall apart over the asking price.
They fall apart seven days in, over a report the seller has never read.
By then you've accepted an offer. The home is off the market. Other buyers have moved on. And you're negotiating against a document you can't verify, with someone who now holds every piece of leverage in the transaction.
The repair itself is rarely the issue. It's that the deduction is almost never the size of the repair — it's the size of your anxiety about losing the deal.
A pre-listing inspection moves that conversation to the front, where you still have options.
What Listing Ready is
Listing Ready
A complete home inspection, performed to Consumer Protection BC standards of practice — the same inspection a buyer's inspector would perform on your home. Then the part that actually matters: every finding sorted into three columns.
Fix
The kind of finding buyers reliably use as leverage. Worth addressing before you list.
Disclose
A real deficiency, but one better disclosed and priced in than repaired. Once it's on the table, it stops being a negotiating lever.
Leave
Normal wear for a home of this age. A buyer's inspector will note it. Nobody negotiates on it.
Most inspection reports run 80 pages and leave you to work out which four items are worth losing sleep over. That third column is the one sellers tell us they didn't know they needed. Half the anxiety in selling a house is spent on things that were never going to cost anything.
What's included
Selling a home means hitting the same problems in the same order. Listing Ready answers all of them.
- You don't know what's wrong.
- A full inspection to CPBC standards of practice.
- You don't know what actually matters.
- The Fix / Disclose / Leave plan, sorted by how buyers negotiate — not by how alarming something sounds.
- You can't describe the work to a contractor.
- A written scope of work for each item worth addressing. You forward it. You don't translate it.
- You don't know who to call.
- Three trades for each category of work. We're paid by you and by nobody else — no referral fees, no commissions, no arrangements with anyone who benefits from what we find.
- The quotes come back wildly different.
- Because every contractor is bidding on the same written scope, they're finally comparable.
- You don't know whether the work was done properly.
- We come back, verify it, and issue a short addendum you can hand to buyers.
- The disclosure statement makes you nervous.
- You'll complete it with a documented record of condition instead of a guess.
- You can't take a weekday off work.
- Inspections run Friday through Sunday. You're welcome to walk through with us.
- The buyer will inspect it anyway.
- They will. And they'll find the things you already fixed, already disclosed, or already know don't matter.
The disclosure question
"If I know about a problem, don't I have to disclose it?"
Yes. And that's the point, not the catch.
The risk sellers actually face isn't disclosing a known problem — disclosed problems get priced in and closed out. The risk is a buyer discovering something after closing and arguing you knew, or should have known, and said nothing. That's the situation that turns into a claim.
Knowing more about your home puts you in a stronger position on your disclosure statement, not a weaker one. It also means you choose what to address and in what order, rather than a buyer choosing for you at the worst possible moment in the transaction.
Every property and every disclosure statement is different. Your realtor and your lawyer should advise you on your specific situation.
Why sellers do this
You set the repair budget.
A repair you arrange on your own timeline, from your own contractor, is routinely a fraction of the credit a buyer will ask for the same work under pressure.
Offers come in cleaner.
Buyers who can see a condition report up front write fewer conditions and shorter subject periods.
Nothing surprises you at subject removal.
The worst moment in a sale stops being a moment.
What it costs
Listing Ready
$695
The full inspection to CPBC standards, plus the Fix / Disclose / Leave plan, written scopes of work, and three trades for each category.
Listing Ready + Envelope
$1,095
Adds a blower door test and building envelope assessment, plus an efficiency summary you can include with your listing. Useful on 1970s–1990s homes, where buyers increasingly ask about heating costs before they ask about anything else.
Repair verification visit
$250
After the work is done, we return, verify it, and issue an addendum.
We don't provide repair cost estimates, and we'd be suspicious of any inspector who does. Estimating is a contractor's job, prices move constantly, and a seller who prices their listing on a number an inspector guessed at is worse off than one who got three real quotes. What we give you instead is a written scope precise enough to get those three quotes on identical work.
Our guarantees
- Report within 24 hours, or the inspection is free. Usually the same evening.
- Calls returned within two hours while your offers are live.
- If we missed an accessible area, we come back at no charge.
Availability
We take a limited number of pre-listing inspections each month, because every report goes out within 24 hours and that only works at a certain volume.
Inspections run Friday through Sunday. Booking typically runs one to two weeks ahead, and longer through the spring market — worth calling before you set a listing date.
Who does the inspection
Northlight is owned and run by Jon, a home inspector licensed by Consumer Protection BC and a certified energy advisor based in North Vancouver. He performs every inspection himself.
The energy advisor side matters more than it sounds. It means looking at a house through two lenses at once — what's broken or wearing out, and how the building actually performs. On the North Shore, with the rain we get and the housing stock we have, those turn out to be the same question more often than not.
More about NorthlightFAQ
- Won't the buyer just get their own inspection anyway?
- Almost certainly, and that's fine. The point isn't to replace their inspection — it's to make sure it doesn't tell you anything new. Surprises are what cost sellers money, not deficiencies.
- Do I have to fix everything you find?
- No. Most sellers fix a handful of items and disclose the rest. That's what the three columns are for — deciding is the product.
- What if you find something serious?
- Then you've found it while you still have every option open: repair it, disclose and price it in, or get a specialist opinion before you list. All of those are better than finding out during a subject period.
- Can my realtor attend?
- Yes, and we'd encourage it. We're also available by phone while your offers are live, so your agent can call us directly rather than relaying questions.
- My house is 50 years old. Is this going to be a disaster?
- Older homes generate longer reports and shorter Fix columns. Most of what an inspector finds in a home that age is expected for its era and irrelevant to the sale. Knowing which is which is most of the value.
- Do you provide repair cost estimates?
- No. We provide a written scope of work so you can get accurate quotes from people who actually do the work.
- How far ahead of listing should I book?
- Ideally three to four weeks. That leaves room to get quotes and complete any repairs you decide on before photography.
- What areas do you serve?
- North Vancouver, West Vancouver, and the Lower Mainland. Ask about travel outside these areas.
The buyer's inspector is coming either way.
You may as well see the house first.
Northlight Home Inspections · Licensed by Consumer Protection BC · Licence #89112 · (236) 240-2451