>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