Atlas Township, Michigan
Looking for an Atlas Township home inspector? We do certified home, commercial, mold and radon inspections in Atlas Township, seven days a week. Home inspection reports come back in 24 hours.
Schedule your inspectionCall 734-331-3269
Services
For buyers, sellers, and homeowners keeping an eye on the place they already own. On new construction we also do pre-drywall inspections and 11-month builder’s warranty inspections. Our certified inspectors walk every major system in your Atlas Township home and tell you plainly what they found — then put it in a photo-rich digital report within 24 hours.
Following the InterNACHI Standards of Practice:
Included free with every home buyer inspection— and none of them require us to sell your information.
SatisfactionIf you are unhappy with your inspector on the day of the inspection, before you have seen your report, tell us and we will make it right — or you owe us nothing.
30-Day WarrantyA free 30-day Guard home warranty trial, negotiated for you with no obligation. Activate it whenever you are ready.
$100 OffThe buyer’s protection guarantee: if the first home we inspect for you does not make it to the closing table, for any reason, we take $100 off any further home buyer inspection within 30 days of the original.
Optional services at an additional cost — not part of a standard inspection. Tap one to see what it covers.
A camera down the main sewer line, watching its condition from the inside — roots, breaks, bellies and blockages no visual inspection can find. More about sewer scope inspections
The wood-destroying organism report VA buyers are typically asked to provide, on the federal NPMA-33 form. Carried out during the same visit. More about Veterans WDO inspections
Up to five air samples sent to an accredited laboratory, added to the same appointment rather than booked as a second visit. More about mold inspection and testing
View a sample report
Offices, retail, multifamily and warehouses in Atlas Township and across Genesee County. Know what condition a building is in before you sign — or stay ahead of problems in the one you already own. Reports in 24 to 72 hours depending on size.
Following the CCPIA commercial standards:
Commonly added to a commercial inspection at additional cost.
Commercial laterals are longer, older and carry more. A camera is the only way to see the condition of the one you are buying. More about sewer scope inspections
Air samples to an accredited laboratory, which matters most in buildings that have sat empty or had a roof or plumbing leak. More about mold inspection and testing
View a sample report
Add either to an Atlas Township home or commercial inspection, or book it on its own. We test and we never remediate, so there is nothing to sell you on the back of a result — the number you get is just the number.
Radon measured in house on a professional continuous monitor; mold samples to an accredited laboratory:
The other things worth testing while somebody is already there.
Carried out after remediation on the treated area and the areas next to it, to confirm what was found. More about mold inspection and testing
A damp basement can have several causes, and the buried sewer line is the one a visual inspection cannot check. A scope rules it in or out. More about sewer scope inspections
View a sample reportAtlas Township housing stock
Atlas Township has roughly 3,024 housing units and about 96% of them are single-family detached. Age is the most useful single fact about a house before anyone has seen it. It narrows down what is worth checking first, and it is why two places of much the same size can need quite different inspections.
If the town has a defining decade it is the 1970s, which accounts for 770 homes, around 25% of the housing stock. At 96% single-family it is almost entirely detached houses, so the inspection is nearly always of a whole building rather than one unit inside one.
The median owner-occupied home here is valued at $285,500. 96% are owner-occupied, which is high even for this area.
Treat this as a starting list, not a diagnosis. An Atlas Township home inspector checks these things early in a home of this age and then records what is genuinely there, which is often not what the era would suggest.
Housing figures: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2022 five-year estimates.
When Atlas Township was built
79% of homes here run on utility gas, and 11 still heat with oil. If yours is one of them, the tank is the thing to ask about — where it is, and whether it was ever buried. Another 312 use bottled or LP gas.
Local knowledge
Atlas Township is the most purely residential community we cover. About 96% of its roughly 3,024 housing units are single-family detached houses — a higher share than anywhere else on our list — and a great many of them sit on acreage at the end of a private drive.
That last detail is regulated here in a way it is not in most townships. Atlas has a driveway ordinance with real numbers in it: a minimum base depth, a minimum culvert size, a minimum width, and additional requirements once a drive passes 500 feet and again at 800 feet, including a turnaround of a specified size. Those are emergency access provisions in all but name.
For a buyer looking at a house set back from the road, that is a genuinely useful lens. Can a fire truck get in, turn around and get out again? Is there a culvert where the drive crosses the ditch, and is it doing its job?
The housing arrived in two waves with real gaps between them: 770 units in the 1970s and 762 in the 1990s, but only seven from the whole of the 1940s, 153 from the 1980s and nothing recorded since 2020.
One more thing to settle before you rely on any local rule. The Township’s own website gives its hall two different postal cities on two different pages, and the Village of Goodrich is a separate government sitting inside the township. A mailing address here really does not tell you which government you are dealing with.
Before you buy
Driveways
The Township’s standard for the construction of driveways applies to drives serving single family homes that are not maintained at public expense — which, in a township like this one, means most of them.
The baseline is a base of at least six inches of crushed limestone, a culvert of at least twelve inches in diameter set in the ditch line to county specification, and a minimum width of ten feet. Permits come from the county road commission, the county drain commission or the state as applicable.
The interesting requirements start once a drive gets long. Over 500 feet, it needs a three foot crushed limestone shoulder on each side and either a turnaround at least sixteen feet wide and twenty-four feet deep or a cul-de-sac with a twenty-five foot radius. Over 800 feet, a full thirty-three foot width has to be dedicated for the drive.
Nobody writes a turnaround requirement for the convenience of the homeowner. Those dimensions exist so an emergency vehicle can reach a house set back from the road and get out again, and violating the ordinance is a misdemeanor rather than a civil matter.
On an inspection we report the driveway as part of the exterior: its surface and condition, drainage across and alongside it, whether the culvert at the road is present, visibly crushed or blocked, and whether the drive pitches water toward the house or away from it. On a long gravel drive the culvert is the component most often quietly failing, and it is the one that takes the ditch line with it when it goes.
Water is the theme. On a rural parcel the grade, the ditch, the culvert and the drive together decide where surface water ends up, and on a property with a septic drainfield that matters a good deal more than it does on a subdivision lot.
Permits
The Building Department issues building permits, now through an online system, and requires every contractor working in the township to be registered with it for a small fee.
Electrical, mechanical and plumbing permits are not the Township’s. They are pulled through the State of Michigan, which means a records request at the township hall will show you the addition, the deck and the pole barn and nothing at all about the furnace, the water heater, the service upgrade or the re-pipe. The silence is not evidence.
Two more agencies appear in the same process. The county drain commission handles soil erosion permits and waivers, and the county health department handles septic requirements — the Township links both from its own building page rather than pretending it owns them.
The Township also links the federal flood map portal and a flood insurance amendment form. Where a lender requires flood insurance because a property falls inside a mapped flood zone, there is a federal process for asking that the determination be amended for a specific parcel. That is a lender, surveyor and federal agency matter rather than an inspection one, but it is worth knowing the route exists before you assume a mapped designation is the final word.
A buyer’s inspection is not a permit search, a flood determination or a survey. It reports the condition and apparent function of the roof, structure, foundation, drainage, electrical, heating and cooling, plumbing and the accessible interior — and says plainly where work looks as though it happened outside the normal process.
Wells and septic
In a township that is 96% detached houses and links its county health department’s septic requirements from the building page, the sensible working assumption on any property is a well and a septic system on the parcel until you learn otherwise.
Both are county health department territory. We do not evaluate septic systems and we do not test water. Those evaluations answer questions a visual inspection genuinely cannot: whether the drainfield is failing, when the tank was last pumped, and what is actually in the water. They also need booking early, because in the buying season they are in demand and a contingency period is short.
What we inspect is the building and everything from the house side of those systems inward: the accessible plumbing, the drain and vent arrangements we can see, how fixtures behave under load, and the visible condition of pump and pressure equipment.
Surface water matters more than buyers expect on a septic property. A drainfield working under ground that is also taking every downspout, the sump discharge and runoff from a long gravel drive is a drainfield working against you. We report the fall of the ground around the building and where the downspouts and any sump discharge appear to go.
Outbuildings are part of the picture too. Pole barns, detached garages and workshops are common on parcels this size, and on many properties they hold as much value as a finished basement would elsewhere. We report their condition where they are within the scope of the inspection, and it is worth agreeing in advance which structures you want included.
Two waves
The township’s housing history has two clear peaks, and knowing which one a property belongs to shapes what the inspection concentrates on.
The 770 houses from the 1970s are now fifty years old. Roofs are on their third covering. Original electrical service was sized for a very different household, and most has been upgraded — but upgrades vary from a genuine rewire to a new panel with original distribution behind it. Plumbing has usually been renewed in part, leaving material transitions worth looking at. Insulation and ventilation reflect the standards of the day, and heating equipment has turned over two or three times, sometimes into venting that has not kept up with the appliance.
The 762 houses from the 1990s are thirty years old, and the questions are about the first round of turnover rather than the third. Original roofs are gone or overdue. Furnaces, water heaters and air conditioning from the build have generally been replaced once, with variable care. Windows, seals and exterior finishes are at the stage where deferred maintenance starts to show. Grading has settled since the build, which on a rural lot is usually the first thing a wet basement points back to.
Behind both sit 241 units predating 1940 — older farmhouses and village property, where the questions are about accumulated alteration rather than any single generation of equipment.
The scope of the inspection does not change between them. What changes is where the time goes, and being clear about that in advance makes for a more useful report.
The buried line
Wherever a property here drains to, the line from the building outward belongs to the owner, and no visual inspection reaches inside it.
On a 1970s house that pipe has been in the ground fifty years, usually under ground that has had exactly as long to grow trees over it. We will not name a material from a build year, because no authoritative source establishes what Atlas Township laterals are generally made of, and a guess in a report is worse than no statement at all.
A sewer camera inspection records what is actually inside the line: roots, cracks, displaced joints, bellies or blockages where they exist, and a clear run where they do not. On a septic property it documents the building drain out to the tank — the owner’s pipe, and the part a health department evaluation does not focus on. It is added to the same appointment rather than booked separately.
Alongside it we offer radon testing, mold inspection and testing, and commercial building inspections to the CCPIA standard for offices, retail, multifamily and warehouse property.
You can read what our clients say, look through answers to common questions, or get in touch about a specific address in Atlas Township — including working out which government it actually sits in.
Local information from Atlas Township — standard for the construction of driveways not maintained at public expense · Atlas Township — Building Department, permits, contractor registration and linked agencies · Atlas Township — code enforcement and the compilation of township ordinances. Municipal requirements change — verify current details with the municipality.
Radon in Genesee County
Zone 2 is the middle EPA category — the predicted average indoor level across the county sits between 2 and 4 pCi/L.
We place a continuous monitor for 48 hours and read the result on site — no mail-in kit, no lab wait. How radon testing works · Genesee County radon and inspection coverage
Zone from the EPA Map of Radon Zones.
Why choose us
Five reasons people here pick us as their Atlas Township home inspector.
Family owned since 2009, more than 16,000 inspections completed and over 2,000 five-star reviews across Michigan. We also handle home buyer inspections, commercial building inspections, mold testing and radon testing.
We do not sell mold remediation or radon mitigation, so there is nothing to gain from a result that comes back bad. The number you get is just the number.
Radon, mold, sewer scope and wood-destroying organism inspections go on the same appointment as the home inspection rather than costing you a second morning.
Most people do, and it is the most useful hour of the whole purchase. Ask anything while we are standing in front of it.
InterNACHI and CCPIA certified, with four Certified Master Inspectors and National Home Inspector Examination passes on the team — none of which Michigan requires. The standards we inspect to are published and you can hold the work against them.
Including weekends, because inspection windows sit on closing dates and closing dates do not care what day it is.
Reviews
Outstanding precision and attention to detail! Helps being able to make a truly informed decision about a home! Also, they are very veteran-friendly! No complaints here!
Desmond SheppardFlint, MINoah Scott was very thorough and explaining things to us, especially in regard to a possible mold problem.
Claudette GranvilleFlint, MII recently hired Trademark for a full home inspection on a new purchase, including sewer scope and radon testing. It was a phenomenal experience from beginning to end. Our inspector, Mitch, did a fantastic job explaining all the findings, and the digital report with photos and videos was superb. Would definitely recommend without hesitation.
Salina HamiltonOak Park, MIWhat happens
Questions
Yes, and specific ones. Its ordinance requires a base of at least six inches of crushed limestone, a culvert of at least twelve inches in diameter in the ditch line to county specification, and a minimum width of ten feet. Drives over 500 feet need shoulders and a turnaround of a stated size, and drives over 800 feet need a thirty-three foot dedicated width.
So an emergency vehicle can reach a house set back from the road and get out again. The Township specifies either a turnaround at least sixteen feet wide and twenty-four feet deep or a cul-de-sac with a twenty-five foot radius on drives over 500 feet. On a property well off the road it is worth checking that what exists actually meets it.
The Township issues building permits and requires contractors to register with it. Electrical, mechanical and plumbing permits are pulled through the State of Michigan. Soil erosion goes to the county drain commission and septic to the county health department, both of which the Township links from its own building page.
On most parcels here, yes. The Township links the county health department’s septic requirements from its building department page, and 96% of the housing is detached. Both the septic evaluation and any water testing go through the county rather than through us, and both are worth booking as soon as you are under contract.
We report their condition where they fall within the scope of the inspection, and on parcels this size they often matter as much as anything inside the house. It is worth agreeing in advance which outbuildings you want included so the time is allowed for.
Where a lender requires flood insurance because a property falls within a mapped flood zone, there is a federal process for asking that the determination be amended for a specific parcel. The Township links both the federal flood map portal and the form. It is a lender, surveyor and federal agency matter rather than an inspection one, but the route exists.
Not necessarily, and the Township’s own site illustrates the problem — it publishes its hall under two different postal cities on two different pages. The Village of Goodrich is a separate government inside the township. Confirm which government a property sits in before relying on any particular local rule.
Yes, and on a septic property it answers something the county evaluation does not. The building drain from the house out to the tank is the owner’s pipe, and on a 1970s house it has been in the ground fifty years under mature trees. A camera inspection documents roots, cracks, displaced joints, bellies or blockages where they exist, and is added to the same visit.
More on cost, timing and what is included on the FAQ page.
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Permits, assessing and property records for Atlas Township are handled by Atlas Township, Michigan, not by us.
From the blog
October 22, 2017
February 18, 2025
April 5, 2024
Your local Atlas Township home inspector, seven days a week. Home inspection reports in 24 hours.
