Find an aggressive home inspector that isn't associated with your realtor, preferably one with general contractor experience and someone who is older. Like it or not, older folks have seen more things go wrong in more ways and can spot problems that younger folks might not be familiar with.

I have certification of an inspector with various home things… Flooring, roofing, general home inspection.. no one wants to pay what it’s worth so I don’t practice that, it’s just fun for learning about the building trades

Further - if you never have a problem the value of the inspection is zero. If you do have a problem the value of an inspection after the problem has occurred is minimal. The value of an inspection that prevents a problem is something - but how to quantify that is difficult.

You quantify it using a binomial. Then calculated the weight averaged expense repair cost using that binomial.

Depending where you live local/state/fed government will keep maps.

Topographic maps, flood risk maps, wildfire risk maps, maps of services nearby (substations, transformer locations, storm drains etc), easements, special planning/protection zones, surrounding area zoning etc.

These should all inform your decision. I've vetoed houses because they back onto nature/wildlife reserves, are too near substations, are in flood risk areas etc

>I've vetoed houses because they back onto nature/wildlife reserves

Why is this a bad thing? To a naive person, it might seem like a good thing, because you get to look out into a forest rather than someone else's yard.

I should have anticipated that question!

Essentially because nobody was allowed to trim/maintain the trees due to it being a natural habitat. It's nice to look at but when a 60m tree falls in a storm and wipes out your house it's not great. The reserve was also on the north side of the property and down here in the southern hemisphere that means that every year as the trees grow your house gets more and more shade with accompanying maintenance issues.

I should add that people may weigh that up and be happy to live there, but people should be aware of the risk/benefits before they buy. Natural light/property orientation and shading is a major issue that most people forget about.

I had a structural engineer come and look at a house I was thinking of buying. It cost me $500. I didn't buy the house, and that $500 was some of the best money I've spent.

How did you find such an engineer with the applicable expertise?

The same way you hire a company for any service, start by searching for local structural/construction engineering firms and then call a few and ask if they’ll do an inspection on a residence.

If you personally know any architects or general contractors in the residential market, they should be able to recommend someone.

Selling a house in Denmark requires the seller to acquire a “condition report” from a certified inspector. The report is valid for 6 months and costs around $1000. This also ties into the optional “owner transfer insurance” which covers serious defects / building code violations undetectable by the inspectors. The insurance lasts 5 years and costs $2000-$5000

In the US afaict inspections are a plus but not required for sellers to provide. Lots of people were waiving their right to inspection in order to make their offers on houses more attractive to buyers. Kind of a stupid thing to do, but people had low interest rates and were desperate to buy

What did they find that was so bad?

1895 house in Oakland with a soft story condition and a dining room that was cantilevered out over the aisle. It was listed for something like $850k in around 2018, so kind of cheap! But correcting the soft story and the rest of the framing would have been astronomically expensive. He guessed something like 400-500k, and now having experienced home renovations, I am fairly certain he was in the ballpark.

Shout out to FEMA's FIRM/FIRMette maps:

https://msc.fema.gov/portal/home

Here in Western Australia there are online floodplain maps which show the extent of a 100-year event. Very usful when you see somewhere nice but wonder why the house and outbuildings are all crammed in the front quarter of the plot...

get a Chinese feng-shui expert; cheaper than pros and reap benefit of thousands of years of real estate wisdom. /s but not really /s lol there are some methods in it's vast amount of madness