Genesee Township, Michigan
Looking for a Genesee Township home inspector? We do certified home, commercial, mold and radon inspections in Genesee 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 Genesee 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 Genesee 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 a Genesee 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 reportGenesee Township housing stock
Genesee Township has roughly 8,918 housing units and about 76% 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 1950s, which accounts for 2,226 homes, around 25% of the housing stock.
The median owner-occupied home here is valued at $108,100. There are around 1,470 manufactured and mobile homes in Genesee Township. Those are a different inspection — the questions are about the frame, the anchoring and the skirting rather than a basement.
Treat this as a starting list, not a diagnosis. A Genesee 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 Genesee Township was built
86% of homes here run on utility gas, and 20 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 192 use bottled or LP gas.
Local knowledge
If you are researching the history of a property here, the single most useful thing to know is that the records are split between two governments — and most people only ask one of them.
Genesee Township issues building permits. For electrical, plumbing and mechanical permits and inspections, the Township directs you to the State of Michigan’s Bureau of Construction Codes at LARA. So the Township can tell you about the addition, the deck, the garage and the roof — but the record of who rewired the house, who replaced the furnace and who repiped the bathroom sits with the state.
That is worth knowing because it is exactly the opposite of how nearby townships operate. In the same county, Vienna Township runs electrical, plumbing and mechanical permitting in-house for four different municipalities. There is no regional rule about this; there is only what each place has decided to do.
The practical version for a buyer: a permit search that stops at the Township counter is a quarter of a search. If the mechanical history of a house matters to you — and on this housing stock it should — the state is the other place to look.
The stock is postwar and settled. Of about 8,918 units, 2,226 date from the 1950s, 1,498 from the 1960s and 1,400 from the 1970s, with 778 predating 1940 and only 79 units built since 2010. Around 76% is single-family detached.
Before you buy
Roofs
The Township’s Building Department publishes an itemized fee schedule, and one line on it is more informative than it looks: residential roofing and re-roofing carries a permit fee, qualified in the Township’s own words as covering no wood replacement.
Two things follow. First, a roof replacement here is permitted work, so there should be a record of it — which is not true everywhere in this region, where some municipalities require no permit for a roof at all. Second, the qualifier tells you that replacing decking is treated as a different and larger job than laying new covering over sound sheathing.
That distinction is exactly the one a buyer wants resolved. A roof laid over sound decking and a roof laid over decking that should have been replaced look identical from the driveway and behave very differently over the next fifteen years.
What an inspection reports on a finished roof is the covering and its condition, the flashings, penetrations, edges and ventilation, and any evidence that a covering was laid over an older one — along with what the attic shows from underneath where it is accessible: staining on sheathing, sagging between rafters, daylight where there should be none, insulation that has been wetted and matted, and whether bathroom and kitchen fans terminate outside or simply into the attic space.
On a housing stock where the 1950s alone account for a quarter of the units, most roofs here are on their third or fourth covering. The interesting question is rarely whether the roof was replaced, but how many times, and what was underneath when it was.
What needs a permit
The Township’s published fee list is a better guide to what needs a permit here than any summary, because it names things people routinely assume are exempt.
Sheds under 200 square feet are on it. So are fences over six feet tall, any change to existing signage including lighting or wording, non-residential exterior site lighting, agricultural buildings, and a permit and inspection under the chicken hen ordinance. Manufactured home setups and piers have their own fees, as do demolitions. There is a published fee for a certificate of occupancy inspection — the Township does not say on that page what triggers one, so if it matters to your situation, ask the Building Department directly rather than assuming either way.
Two lines are worth reading as warnings rather than prices. Permits can be extended or reinstated for a fee, per 180 days — which tells you permits here expire and that letting one lapse is a recoverable but not free mistake. And stop work orders result in double permit fees, which is the Township saying plainly what starting without a permit costs.
Contractor registration runs three years, and the Township publishes a substantial set of guidance alongside the applications: residential wall sections, a wood deck guide with plans, garage wall sections, detached garage and pole barn plans, a smoke and carbon monoxide alarm sheet, demolition requirements, a new construction checklist and a plan review checklist. For a township this size that is a generous amount of published detail.
On the enforcement side, Code Enforcement publishes an abandoned property ordinance and a vacant property registration form. If you are looking at a house that has stood empty, that is worth asking about before closing rather than after.
A buyer’s inspection covers the roof, structure, foundation, drainage, electrical, heating and cooling, plumbing and the accessible interior, and reports what the building actually shows. The permit files — both of them — tell you what was declared. The two together are the full picture.
Stormwater and water supply
The Township’s Department of Public Works publishes its federal stormwater permit in full, which is more transparency than most municipalities offer on the subject.
The permit authorizes discharge from the Township’s municipal separate storm sewer system — an MS4 — to surface waters of the state, under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act and the state’s Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act, subject to effluent limits, monitoring requirements and other conditions. The DPW invites public comment on it directly.
What an MS4 designation means in practice is that storm water here is collected and discharged separately from sanitary sewage, and that the Township is accountable for what reaches surface water through it. For a property owner the relevant consequence is the same one everywhere: what leaves your roof and your sump has to go somewhere, and where it goes is not a matter of indifference.
That is a live part of an inspection. We report accessible grading and how the ground falls away from the foundation, gutters and downspouts and where they actually discharge, foundation conditions, the basement or crawlspace, and any sump equipment and where it sends what it pumps — including where a discharge line disappears underground to a destination nobody can name.
On drinking water, the Township publishes its own consumer confidence report alongside the Beecher Metro District report and a link to the county-wide water information site, so the supply here involves a metro district rather than a Township treatment plant. We do not test water — that is a separate discipline with its own certified laboratories — and those published reports are the authoritative source for what is in the supply.
The buried line
Where a property here is on a public sewer, the buried lateral running from the building to the main is the one component no visual inspection reaches.
On a 1950s house — and 2,226 of them were built here in that decade — that pipe has been in the ground seventy years, with the trees planted when the subdivision went up now at full size above it. That is long enough for roots to find a joint, for ground movement to displace a section, or for a repair to have been made that nobody now remembers. We will not name a material from a build year, because no authoritative source establishes what Genesee Township laterals are generally made of.
On a property with a septic system the question is a different one and belongs to a county health department evaluation rather than to us. We do not evaluate septic systems and we do not test water.
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. It is added to the same visit rather than booked separately. Alongside it, commercial building inspections follow the CCPIA standard for offices, retail, multifamily and warehouse property, and radon testing or mold inspection and testing can be added to a residential or commercial visit. Get in touch to talk through a particular property.
Local information from Genesee Charter Township — Building Department, fee schedule and permit guidance · Genesee Charter Township — Department of Public Works, MS4 permit and water reports · Genesee Charter Township — Code Enforcement, abandoned and vacant property · Genesee Charter 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 Genesee 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
In two places, which is the thing most people miss. Genesee Township issues building permits and holds those records. For electrical, plumbing and mechanical permits and inspections, the Township directs you to the State of Michigan’s Bureau of Construction Codes at LARA. A search that stops at the Township counter will not tell you who rewired the house, replaced the furnace or repiped a bathroom.
Yes. The Township publishes a residential roofing and re-roofing permit fee, qualified in its own words as covering no wood replacement — so replacing decking is treated as a different job. That is useful for a buyer in two ways: a re-roof here should leave a record, and the qualifier tells you sheathing work is separately accounted for.
Quite a lot. The Township’s fee schedule names sheds under 200 square feet, fences over six feet tall, any change to existing signage including lighting or wording, non-residential exterior site lighting, agricultural buildings, manufactured home setups and piers, demolition, and a permit and inspection under the chicken hen ordinance. If you are planning something small, check first.
The Township states it plainly on its fee schedule: stop work orders result in double permit fees. It also charges for extending or reinstating a permit per 180 days, which tells you permits here expire and a lapsed one has to be dealt with rather than ignored.
The Township publishes a fee for a certificate of occupancy inspection, but it does not say on that page what triggers one — so we are not going to guess, and neither should you. If it could apply to your situation, ask the Building Department directly. The Township also publishes an abandoned property ordinance and a vacant property registration form, which is worth asking about on a house that has stood empty.
The Township publishes its own consumer confidence report alongside the Beecher Metro District report and a link to the county-wide water information site, so the supply involves a metro district rather than a Township plant. On stormwater, the Township holds and publishes a federal permit authorizing discharge from its municipal separate storm sewer system to surface waters of the state, and invites public comment on it.
Postwar and settled. Of about 8,918 housing units, 2,226 date from the 1950s, 1,498 from the 1960s and 1,400 from the 1970s, with 778 predating 1940 and only 79 built since 2010. Around 76% is single-family detached. On stock of that age, systems have almost always been replaced in stages by different people across several decades, which is why the junctions between old work and new are where an inspection spends its time.
On a public sewer, yes. For a 1950s house the lateral has been in the ground seventy years, with subdivision trees planted at the same time now at full size above it. We will not guess a material from a build year. Putting a camera down the line documents roots, cracks, displaced joints, bellies or blockages where they exist, and is added to the same appointment. On a septic property the question belongs to a county evaluation instead.
More on cost, timing and what is included on the FAQ page.
Police, fire, rescue, military and educators — our way of saying thank you for your service. Enter code HERO at checkout.
Claim the Hero DiscountNeed a Genesee Township home inspector and not sure we reach you? Call 734-331-3269 and we will tell you.
From the blog
October 22, 2017
November 11, 2020
Your local Genesee Township home inspector, seven days a week. Home inspection reports in 24 hours.
