Things Buyers Should Look for When Touring a Home

These are items we would go through during a remote consultation and general best practices to decrease the chances of not realizing what you're buying

You’re walking through an open house, trying to picture yourself living there while simultaneously wondering if the place is going to cost you $50,000 in foundation repairs. I’ve done over 7,000 foundation inspections in the Bay Area. Here’s what I’d be looking for if I were in your shoes.

The Reality of Prepped / Staged Homes

First, understand this: most homes in the Bay Area are prepped for sale. Walls get patched. Cracks get filled. This isn’t deceptive—it’s common practice and if you were selling a home you’d likely do the same but it can make things a bit harder.

Cracks in Walls and Ceilings

This is the obvious one, but there’s nuance here.

Look for patches. Stand at different angles. Sometimes you’ll catch the texture difference, a subtle bulge, or a slightly different paint sheen where repairs were made. Ask the listing agent when the house was last painted—this gives you a timeline.

Here’s what most people miss: on highly expansive soils, cracks can reappear within weeks of painting. So even a freshly painted house might show small cracks. Pay special attention to the corners of windows and doors. That’s where stress concentrates and where cracks typically show up first.

Uneven Floors

Walk the entire house. Every room. Multiple directions. Get all the way into the corners—staging furniture often blocks the areas where you’d feel the slope most.

Here’s the thing about floor slopes: sensitivity varies wildly between people. Some folks can detect a quarter-inch drop across a room. Others walk right over a half-inch slope without noticing. Bring people with you and compare notes. The more data points, the better.

Doors That Stick or Aren’t Square

Doors stick for lots of reasons—too many coats of paint, thick carpet, humidity. So a sticking door alone doesn’t mean much. What you’re really looking for is whether the door frame is square.

When a house racks or settles significantly, the door frames go out of square with it. You’ll see uneven gaps around the door, or the door won’t close properly no matter how much you fiddle with it. Also check if doors have been shaved. Someone trimming the bottom or edge of a door to make it close is a sign they were compensating for something.

Baseboard Gaps

Some minor gaps between baseboards and flooring are normal—construction tolerances, seasonal movement, nothing alarming. But large, obvious gaps where the baseboard pulls away from the floor or wall? That’s telling you the house has moved.

Building Your Eye

The more houses you walk through, the better you get at this. After a while, you’ll walk into a place and immediately sense something’s off before you can even articulate why. Your real estate agent can help here too—good agents have been through hundreds or thousands of homes and usually have decent instincts about this stuff.

But I’ll be honest: it’s inherently subjective. The direction of the slope, how the furniture is arranged, even the lighting can affect what you perceive. And here’s one that catches people: sometimes floors have been artificially re-leveled with overlayment or self-leveling compound, but nobody addressed the underlying cause. The floor feels flat, but the problem is still there.

What This Gets You

None of this replaces an actual foundation inspection. To really know what’s going on, you need someone in the crawl space with a level, taking readings, looking at the structure. That’s what we do.

But this initial screening matters. If you’re doing a remote consultation with us, these observations—combined with our data on soil conditions and movement history in your area—help us assess risk. Sometimes we can tell you an area has consistently low risk for foundation movement, which might give you enough confidence to proceed in a competitive situation where you can’t get a full inspection contingency.

One Last Thing

Take pictures. Take videos. If you feel a slope in one area, do a quick walk-through video narrating what you’re noticing. “This corner feels like it drops off.” “There’s a crack here at the window corner.” This is incredibly useful for a remote consultation and helps us give you better guidance.

You’re not going to become a foundation expert from an open house visit. But you can gather enough information to make smarter decisions about which properties deserve a closer look—and which ones might be hiding expensive problems under fresh paint and staged furniture.