Buyer Education · August 27, 2026 · 9 min read
Last Thursday I sat at closing with a first-time buyer in Harford County. Nice ranch, move-in ready, inspection came back spotless. Not even a drip under the kitchen sink.
Two weeks after closing, the furnace died. Twenty-two years old, original to the house. The inspector had noted its age but called it "functional." Technically true. It functioned for exactly eleven more days after the buyer took the keys.
I'm not here to trash the inspector. He did his job. But that closing table conversation has been rattling around in my head all week, and I want to talk about something nobody explains to buyers: what a clean inspection report actually means, and what it doesn't.
Let me start with the good news. Most of the time, a clean inspection on a well-maintained home in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, or D.C. is exactly what it looks like: a well-maintained home.
I've represented buyers on houses where the sellers had lived there thirty years, replaced the roof at year fifteen, the HVAC at year twelve, kept every receipt in a three-ring binder, and pressure-washed the deck every spring. Those inspections come back clean because there's nothing wrong. The house was loved.
You'll see this more often in certain pockets. Parts of Bel Air, established neighborhoods in Anne Arundel County, some of the older sections of York and Lancaster Counties in Pennsylvania where people buy once and stay put. When you're the second owner of a house that the first owner treated like a member of the family, a clean inspection is a gift.
But then there are the other ones.
The flips. The estate sales where nobody's lived in the house for two years. The "I'm selling because I took a job in Texas" listings where the seller bought fourteen months ago and you're quietly wondering what they know that you don't.
A home inspection in Maryland—or any state I'm licensed in—has limits. The inspector walks the property for two to four hours. They're looking for visible defects and code violations. They're not tearing into walls, they're not running the air conditioning in February, and they're not predicting when a twenty-year-old water heater is going to give up.
The American Society of Home Inspectors publishes standards of practice that are pretty clear about this. Inspectors evaluate the condition of systems at the time of inspection. That's it.
So when an inspection comes back spotless on a house that's been vacant for eight months, or a flip where the seller put in luxury vinyl plank and subway tile but didn't touch the electrical panel from 1987, I get twitchy.
Here's what I learned in my years in education that applies to real estate: just because something works today doesn't mean it will work tomorrow, and age is a predictor even when it's not a problem yet.
That furnace I mentioned at the top? It worked. The inspector ran it. It heated the house. But the average lifespan of a gas furnace in Maryland is fifteen to twenty years, and this one was already past the expiration date. The inspection noted the age in the report, buried on page eighteen, but didn't flag it as urgent because it wasn't broken.
The buyer—sweet guy, first house, teaches middle school in Harford County—read "functional" and moved on. He didn't know to ask, "Okay, but when should I budget to replace this?" That's on me, honestly. I should've flagged it harder.
When you're buying homes for sale in Baltimore County, Harford County, Cecil County, or anywhere in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, your inspector is going to note the age of the roof, the HVAC, the water heater, and the appliances. If those ages are all in the high teens or low twenties and the report comes back "no significant defects," that's not a clean inspection. That's a countdown clock.
If your Maryland home inspection comes back with zero red flags, here's what I tell my buyer clients to do before we waive that inspection contingency:
Ask the age question for every major system. Even if it's working fine. The National Association of Realtors publishes life expectancy guides, and your inspector can usually ballpark replacement costs. Build a mental budget for the next five years.
Request maintenance records. Sellers aren't required to provide them, but if they have them, it's worth asking. A furnace that's been serviced annually is different from one that's been ignored for a decade, even if they're the same age.
Get a second opinion on the big stuff. If the roof is nineteen years old and the inspector says it's "serviceable," spend two hundred bucks and have a roofer come look at it. Same for HVAC, same for septic systems in Carroll or Cecil County. Specialists see things generalists miss.
Read the whole report. I know it's thirty pages of dense text and photos of crawl spaces. Read it anyway. The stuff that doesn't make the summary can still cost you money.
If you're working with a Maryland realtor who's paying attention (and if you're reading this, I hope you'll reach out so we can make sure you are), they should be walking you through this. But I've seen enough buyers get blindsided by "clean" inspections that I wanted to put it in writing.
Maryland's residential contract includes an inspection contingency. So do Pennsylvania, Delaware, and D.C. You have a window—usually seven to ten days, sometimes more if you negotiate it—to inspect the property and decide whether to move forward, renegotiate, or walk away.
Some buyers waive it to make their offer stronger. I get it. In a competitive market, especially on homes for sale in Howard County or Montgomery County where you're up against five other offers, you're looking for an edge.
But here's my take, and I'll own that it's an opinion: if you're waiving inspection, you'd better have deep pockets and a tolerance for surprises. A clean inspection is useful information. No inspection is a gamble.
The Maryland Department of Labor licenses home inspectors, and while licensing doesn't guarantee perfection, it does mean there's a baseline standard and a complaint process if something goes sideways. Use it.
Okay, one more scenario, and then I'll let you go.
Sometimes I see an inspection report that's so glowing it makes me suspicious. No minor defects, no deferred maintenance, no recommendations, just page after page of "satisfactory" and "functional."
Either that house is a unicorn, or the inspector phoned it in.
I've been doing this long enough to know that every house has something. A window that doesn't quite latch. A gutter that's pulling away. A GFCI outlet in the bathroom that doesn't trip when you test it. These aren't deal-breakers, but they're real, and a thorough inspector catches them.
If your report reads like a love letter, ask questions. Did the inspector actually go in the attic? Did they pull the panel cover on the electrical box? Did they run all the faucets, test all the outlets, check for moisture in the crawl space?
You're paying for that inspection—usually four hundred to six hundred dollars in Maryland, sometimes more for a larger or older home. You should get four hundred to six hundred dollars' worth of information, not a rubber stamp.
Quick side note, because I get this question at least twice a month: the appraisal is not a substitute for an inspection.
The appraiser is there to tell the lender whether the house is worth what you're paying for it. They're looking at value, not condition. They'll note if the roof is visibly damaged or the foundation is cracked, but they're not testing the furnace, they're not checking for radon, and they're not looking for water damage behind the washing machine.
I covered some of this in my recent post about what buyers in Maryland need to know after federal guidance got pulled, but it's worth repeating: the lender's appraisal protects the lender. Your inspection protects you. They're not interchangeable.
I had a buyer last year—great couple, relocating to Cecil County from Pennsylvania for work—who got an inspection that came back pristine. Seller had renovated everything. New kitchen, new baths, new paint, refinished floors.
The inspector noted, almost as an aside, that the breaker panel was original to the house and probably undersized for modern loads, but it wasn't a safety issue. Just something to "keep an eye on."
Buyers loved the house, made the offer, closed in thirty days. Six months later they called me because they kept tripping breakers every time they ran the microwave and the dishwasher at the same time. Turns out the panel needed to be upgraded, and it cost them twenty-two hundred dollars.
Not the end of the world. But if we'd dug into that detail during inspection, we could've asked the seller to credit it or fix it before closing. Instead, it became their problem.
That's what I mean when I say a clean inspection isn't always clean. Sometimes it's just quiet.
If I were buying a home in Maryland today—let's say Harford County, because that's where my office is and I know the inventory—here's what I'd do even if the inspection came back perfect:
I'd budget a couple thousand dollars for surprises in the first year. I'd schedule HVAC maintenance within the first month so a tech could tell me how much life is left in the system. I'd ask the seller, in writing, when the roof was last replaced and whether they have any warranties I can assume.
And I'd read that inspection report twice. Once when I got it, and once right before closing, just to make sure I didn't miss anything the first time through.
You can see what's currently available in the counties I serve here, and if you're in the market and want someone in your corner who'll actually read the fine print with you, let's talk.
A Maryland home inspection that finds nothing isn't automatically a red flag. But it's not a free pass, either.
Ask about the age of major systems. Get maintenance records if you can. Read the whole report, not just the summary. And if something feels off—if the house is old but the report is glowing, or if big-ticket items are "functional" but ancient—dig deeper before you waive your contingency.
I spent twenty years teaching people to ask better questions. That skill translates. The best question you can ask during a home inspection isn't "Is this house perfect?" It's "What am I going to need to fix in the next five years, and how much will it cost?"
The answer to that question is worth a lot more than a clean report.
Katrina Kirton Sherrod, REALTOR® · Samson Properties · Licensed in MD, DC, PA & DE · 443-616-9770 · Katrina@kkstherealtor.com
“Buy land — they are not making it anymore.” — Mark Twain