Clinton, Michigan
Looking for a Clinton home inspector? We do certified home, commercial, mold and radon inspections in Clinton, 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 Clinton 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 Clinton and across Lenawee 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 a Clinton 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 reportClinton housing stock
Clinton has roughly 1,146 housing units and about 74% of them are single-family detached. The year a house went up decides more about what an inspection turns up than almost anything else about it, which is why it is where we start rather than where we finish.
More of it dates from the years before 1940 than from any other decade — 359 homes, roughly 31% of the town.
The median owner-occupied home here is valued at $164,100. 86% are owner-occupied, which is high even for this area. There are around 177 manufactured and mobile homes in Clinton. Those are a different inspection — the questions are about the frame, the anchoring and the skirting rather than a basement.
This is not a forecast for any one address. It is where a Clinton home inspector starts in a home of this age — and whatever we actually find, it goes in the report with photographs.
Housing figures: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2022 five-year estimates.
When Clinton was built
91% of homes here run on utility gas.
Local knowledge
Clinton is a village that runs its own utilities, and it publishes more about them than most places do. Two things follow from that for a buyer: the answers to some genuinely useful questions are already written down, and the people to ask are down the road rather than in a call center.
The Village owns and operates its own electric utility. It is a member of the Michigan South Central Power Agency alongside Coldwater, Hillsdale and Marshall, it is fed at 40,000 volts by two separate Detroit Edison interconnection circuits, and it runs two of its own substations with automatic transfer equipment that switches the village load between them if one incoming circuit fails.
That is not trivia. It means your electricity supplier is the Village, an outage is reported to the Village, and questions about a service drop, a mast or a meter go to the Village rather than to a large utility. If you have only ever dealt with a big provider, it is a different relationship and worth knowing about before closing.
The other thing Clinton publishes is a service line inventory listing water service materials address by address — and unlike a summary, it names your street number. We go into what is in it below, because it is the single most useful document a buyer here can read.
The housing is older than you might expect. Around 359 of roughly 1,146 units predate 1940, which is the largest single group, with a second cluster of 238 built in the 1970s. About a quarter of the housing stock is something other than a detached house.
Before you buy
The buried line
Most communities can tell you nothing specific about the pipe running to a particular house. Clinton can. Its service line materials inventory lists individual addresses — we counted 1,103 rows — and there is a companion water service material map as well.
What makes it unusually useful is that it does not stop at the Village’s property. The table splits each service into three separate segments: the public portion from the main to the shutoff, the public portion before the meter, and the private portion after the meter. That last one is the homeowner’s pipe, and it is the part a buyer inherits.
Each segment is classified for lead status — lead, lead likely, lead unlikely — and recorded by material: copper, galvanized, plastic, ductile iron or unknown. Many rows also carry a year the line was replaced, and those dates cluster in the last few years, so replacement work has been going on.
Reading across the whole table, copper is much the most commonly recorded material, followed by galvanized and then plastic. Lead does appear in the record. We are deliberately not quoting percentages, because the published layout does not survive automated column reading cleanly enough for us to stand behind a figure — and a number we cannot defend is worse than no number.
What we will say without hesitation is this: look the address up before you buy, and read the private after-meter column as carefully as the public ones. Galvanized service pipe corrodes from the inside, which shows up as reduced flow and discolored water long before anything leaks, and it is the owner’s to deal with.
The Village also publishes lead service line procedures, an inventory plan and a separate list of Lead and Copper Rule addresses. If the inventory shows anything you do not like at a specific address, those are the documents to ask the Village about.
Water
The Village draws from two wells and treats the water at the well houses with chlorine and a polyphosphate. The Village explains the reasoning plainly: the chlorine disinfects, and the polyphosphate conditions the water to stabilize it and make it less corrosive, which also stops iron and manganese forming the precipitates that cause sediment and discolored water.
Supply comes primarily from well number five at 500 gallons per minute. Well four matches that rate but, in the Village’s own words, with visibly higher iron content. Both are treated at an iron removal plant. The tower holds 250,000 gallons.
For an inspection that context matters. Iron-bearing water leaves staining in fixtures and sinks, loads up softeners and filters, and accumulates in water heaters as sediment. When we find heavy staining in a Clinton house we are not automatically calling it neglect — but we do note it, and we look at the condition and age of any treatment equipment, because that equipment is doing real work here.
A corrosion-conditioned supply is also the backdrop to the service line question above. Treatment reduces how aggressive the water is toward pipe; it does not turn galvanized pipe into copper.
We check the water heater’s age, its temperature and pressure relief valve and discharge arrangement, visible corrosion, and how it is vented. We run fixtures to see how the system behaves under load rather than testing one tap and moving on.
Connection fees, incidentally, are charged by meter size multiplied by the number of units, so a change of use or an added unit is a fee conversation with the Village and not an afterthought.
The old core
Roughly 359 of the housing units here were built before 1940, the largest single group in the village, and on a house of that age the inspection is a different exercise from a walk round a modern build.
Electrical systems in those houses have usually been rebuilt in stages by different hands across eighty years or more. We look for what that leaves behind: mixed wiring types meeting in the same box, ungrounded receptacles, undersized or overfilled panels, overfused circuits, and connections made in places that were never meant to be permanent.
Plumbing tends to have been renewed in part rather than in whole, so material transitions at the joins are where problems concentrate. Roof coverings will be several generations deep. Heating equipment is typically several replacements from the original, and how well it was fitted matters more than how new it is.
Foundations of that period are usually stone or early block, and their condition depends far more on how water has been managed around the building than on how they were built. We look at grading, at where downspouts discharge, at any sump arrangement, and at what past water has left on the inside face of the walls.
The second cluster is the 1970s, at 238 units. Those are now past fifty and into their second or third round of major component replacement, with aluminum branch wiring a live question in houses of that era — we report it where we find it, because it changes what a buyer needs to do next.
About a quarter of the stock is not a detached house. In a small village that usually means converted upper floors, small multi-unit buildings and mixed commercial and residential in the old core. Shared roofs, shared walls and shared services all raise questions a single-family inspection does not, and we scope those properly before the visit. Commercial building inspections to the CCPIA standard are available where a building is genuinely commercial.
Waste water
The Village’s original wastewater treatment plant was built in the 1940s and provided primary treatment only — grit removal, settling, chlorination and sludge drying beds — discharging to the Raisin River.
It was reconstructed in 1978 to 1980 to increase capacity and improve performance, adding secondary treatment through rotating biological discs and secondary clarifiers, with sand filtration before discharge. The Village states the rebuild helped improve the water quality of the Raisin River.
None of that tells you anything about the pipe under a particular front yard, which is the part that actually costs a homeowner money. On a village where the largest group of houses predates 1940, that pipe can be extremely old, and no visual inspection reaches inside it.
A sewer camera inspection records what is actually in there: roots, cracks, displaced joints, bellies and blockages where they exist, and a clear run where they do not. On a pre-1940 house with mature street trees, roots are the common finding and they do not announce themselves until the day the drains back up.
We are not going to name a material from a build year. The Village’s published Utility Rules and Regulations document would be the place to look for how responsibility is divided, but the copy on the website is a scan with no readable text, so we will not characterize what it says. Ask the Village office directly, and get the answer for the address rather than in general.
Permits and questions
The Village’s building department page currently says only that it is under construction. That means we cannot tell you from published sources who issues building permits here, and we are not going to guess. Ask the village office, and ask before you plan any work rather than after.
It is worth asking for the permit history on the specific property at the same time. On a village with a lot of pre-1940 housing, decades of alterations have accumulated, and the gap between what was permitted and what is physically there is a gap a buyer inherits.
The Village does maintain its own police department, public works, and a planning commission and downtown development authority, so a question about the property is usually answerable by someone local rather than by a county office an hour away.
A buyer’s inspection is not a permit search and does not assess zoning compliance. What it does is establish what is actually there and what condition it is in, so that the questions you take to the Village are specific ones about real things.
Radon testing and mold inspection and testing can be added to the same visit. We deliver a full written report with photographs, generally the same day, so you can act on it while you still have room to negotiate. You can read what our clients say, browse answers to common questions, or get in touch about a specific address in Clinton.
Local information from Village of Clinton — Electric Department, power supply and substations · Village of Clinton — Water treatment and distribution system · Village of Clinton — service line materials of all addresses, April 2025 · Village of Clinton — wastewater treatment plant history. Municipal requirements change — verify current details with the municipality.
Why choose us
Five reasons people here pick us as their Clinton 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
I 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, MIWe had Mitch inspect our prospective house and he was amazing. He was thorough, patient to answer my questions and provide feedback on what areas he would recommend having a follow up expert and why. The office was responsive and I was able to book multiple services to be done in the same visit (inspection, radon test, sewer scope).
Chris PlaweckiOak Park, MIThis is one of the finest companies I have come across - that means serious customer service and professionalism. Justin was the inspector and he was very thorough yet very kind to answers all the questions that came in my mind during inspection. He took enough time, no rush, and a very detailed inspection was conducted. Extremely competitive pricing and timing from the company. 100% recommend to anyone looking for any kind of property inspection!!
Chirag R MiyaniMichiganWhat happens
Questions
The Village does. Clinton owns and operates its own electric utility and is a member of the Michigan South Central Power Agency. Outages, service drops and meter questions go to the Village rather than to a large regional utility.
Yes, and that is unusual. The Village publishes a service line materials inventory listing individual addresses, plus a service material map. Look the address up before you buy.
It does. The table splits each service into the public portion from the main to the shutoff, the public portion before the meter, and the private portion after the meter. That last one is the homeowner’s.
Lead appears in the Village’s published inventory, which is exactly why the inventory is worth reading for a specific address rather than in general. The Village also publishes lead service line procedures and a separate Lead and Copper Rule address list.
The Village explains that it conditions the water to make it less corrosive and to stop iron and manganese forming precipitates that cause sediment and discoloration. Both village wells also run through an iron removal plant.
We cannot tell you from published sources — the Village’s building department page is currently under construction. Ask the village office directly, and do it before planning work.
On a village where the largest group of houses predates 1940, yes. The pipe from the house is old, no visual inspection reaches inside it, and street trees make roots the common finding. A camera inspection is added to the same visit.
Yes. About a quarter of Clinton’s housing stock is something other than a detached house, and shared roofs, walls and services raise questions a standard single-family inspection does not. Tell us what the building actually is and we will scope it properly.
More on cost, timing and what is included on the FAQ page.
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Permits, assessing and property records for Clinton are handled by the Village of Clinton, not by us.
From the blog
October 22, 2017
November 23, 2017
Your local Clinton home inspector, seven days a week. Home inspection reports in 24 hours.
