Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan
Looking for a Grosse Pointe Park home inspector? We do certified home, commercial, mold and radon inspections in Grosse Pointe Park, 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 Grosse Pointe Park 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 Grosse Pointe Park and across Wayne 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 Grosse Pointe Park 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 reportGrosse Pointe Park housing stock
Grosse Pointe Park has roughly 4,845 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 years before 1940, which accounts for 2,864 homes, around 59% of the housing stock.
The median owner-occupied home here is valued at $445,100. Around 950 homes sit in two-to-four unit buildings, where a shared roof, a shared wall and sometimes a shared furnace mean the report has to be clear about where one unit stops.
Treat this as a starting list, not a diagnosis. A Grosse Pointe Park 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 Grosse Pointe Park was built
90% of homes here run on utility gas. Another 15 use bottled or LP gas.
Local knowledge
Grosse Pointe Park requires a Certificate of Occupancy whenever there is a change of ownership of a home or business. The City inspector must inspect the property, and all code violations must be corrected before the certificate is issued.
The terms are specific and worth planning around. Inspections are by appointment only, and the City asks that they be scheduled at least two weeks ahead. Fees are paid in advance — $200 for a single-family residence, rising by unit count to $400 for a four-family. And the certificate is valid for two years from the date of the initial inspection.
That two-year validity is unusual. Most point-of-sale certificates in this region expire on the next transfer of ownership; here there is a clock as well. It is worth knowing which applies to a property you are buying, and when the current certificate was issued.
The other thing that shapes property here is age. Nearly three in five homes in this city — 2,863 of about 4,845 units — were built before 1940. That is one of the oldest housing stocks anywhere in this region, and it means a municipal inspection and a buyer’s inspection are both looking at buildings that have been altered by four or five generations of owners.
Before you buy
The certificate of occupancy
The Building Department is clear about the trigger: a change of ownership of a home or business, or new residential construction. There is no way around it on a sale, and the certificate will not issue while code violations stand.
What the City does not publish is the scope — the specific list its inspector works through. So we are not going to tell you what will be looked at. Ask the department when you book, because knowing in advance is the difference between a clean first visit and a correction cycle inside a closing timetable.
What we can be clear about is the distinction between the two inspections you will encounter. The City’s exists to decide whether a certificate can be issued; it is a compliance check, and it reports to the City. It is not an assessment of the roof’s remaining life, the age and condition of the heating and cooling equipment, the state of the foundation, how water moves around the building, or the electrical service and how it has been extended over a century.
A buyer’s inspection covers the roof, structure, foundation, drainage, electrical, heating and cooling, plumbing and the accessible interior, and reports to you with photographs and plain language. On a prewar house the most useful findings are usually at the junctions — where newer wiring meets original, where an addition meets the original structure, where a finished basement covers what used to be visible — and those are not compliance questions at all.
Plan for both, and start the City’s first. Two weeks lead time plus a possible correction and re-inspection is not something to discover in the final two weeks.
Large houses
The City’s building permit requirements draw a line that most municipalities do not, and in a city with this housing stock it catches a real number of properties.
One- and two-family residential buildings with less than 3,500 square feet of calculated floor area follow the residential requirements: an application and a minimum of two sets of plans covering foundation and floor plans, roof and wall section, elevations and a site plan.
One- and two-family residential buildings with more than 3,500 square feet follow the commercial requirements — which means a plan review approval letter, and plan review approved before any building permit is issued.
If you are buying a large older house here and planning work, that threshold decides your timetable. It also tells you something about how the City views these buildings: above a certain size, a house is a structure serious enough to warrant formal plan review.
The same document sets out that a minimum of four inspections are required on most structures, that the permit holder is responsible for calling for them before construction is covered, and that two days notice is expected. That last phrase — before the construction is covered — is the whole principle of inspection in five words, and it is exactly why the parts of a building that get closed up are the parts a buyer knows least about.
Permits themselves are required broadly: the City names additions, decks, sheds, garages, fencing, furnaces and air conditioning units, hot tubs and pools, and water heaters. Applications go through the online system, though the City notes payments must still be made at the counter or by drop box rather than online.
Prewar housing
A city where 2,863 homes predate 1940 is a city of buildings that were finished before modern wiring, modern plumbing and modern heating existed in their current form. Everything in them that is current was added later, by different people, at different times, to different standards.
That produces a recognizable pattern. Electrical services have usually been upgraded at the panel while some original branch wiring remains behind the plaster, so what the panel suggests and what the circuits actually are can differ. Original supply plumbing has passed the end of any normal service life whatever it is made of. Heating has often moved through two or three generations of technology in the same chimney, which is where venting arrangements get interesting. Foundations are frequently stone or unreinforced masonry with the drainage arrangements of their day.
None of that makes an old house a bad house. Many of them have outlasted things built fifty years later, and they were built with materials and care that are hard to buy now. But it does mean the useful questions are about what has been done rather than what was originally built, and about whether the building has been maintained as a whole or patched a piece at a time.
On the water side, older houses in an older city carry an older drainage story: original grading that has settled, downspouts that have been re-routed more than once, basements that have been finished and re-finished, and sump arrangements added at some point by somebody. We report accessible grading and how the ground falls, gutters and downspouts and where they discharge, foundation conditions, the basement or crawlspace and what it shows about past water, and any sump equipment and where its discharge goes.
The City publishes a water meter replacement program, an annual drinking water quality report and a page explaining changes to water and sewer billing. We do not test water — that is a separate discipline with its own certified laboratories, and the published report is the authoritative source. The city code carries the rest.
The buried line
On nearly three in five houses in this city, the buried lateral running from the building to the sewer main went in before 1940. It is the one component no visual inspection reaches, and it is not what the City’s certificate inspection is for.
Ninety years is long enough for anything. Roots find joints, and the street trees that make these neighborhoods what they are have had the whole time to do it. Ground moves. Sections get repaired and the repair is forgotten by the next owner but one. We will not name a material from a build year, because no authoritative source establishes what Grosse Pointe Park laterals are generally made of — and across a century of building, more than one material is certainly in the ground, sometimes in the same run.
Given that a certificate inspection is already happening at every change of ownership, adding a look inside the line is a small addition to a process you are going through anyway — and it covers the one thing the municipal inspection does not.
A sewer camera inspection records what is actually inside: 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. The neighboring Grosse Pointe Woods is a separate city with its own requirements — confirm which of the Grosse Pointes an address is in before relying on any of this. Get in touch to talk through a particular property.
Local information from City of Grosse Pointe Park — Building Department and certificates of occupancy · City of Grosse Pointe Park — requirements for obtaining building permits · City of Grosse Pointe Park — city code and charter. Municipal requirements change — verify current details with the municipality.
Radon in Wayne County
Zone 3 is the lowest of the three EPA categories — the predicted average indoor level across the county is below 2 pCi/L. So on the state’s map Grosse Pointe Park sits well away from the worst of it, and we are not going to dress that up into something it is not. What a zone cannot tell you is anything about one house: 17% of tests actually run in Wayne County still came back at or above the EPA’s 4 pCi/L action level, which is about one in six. Zones are drawn around counties, not around addresses, which is why the only number that settles the question is the one from the house itself.
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 · Wayne County radon and inspection coverage
Zone from the EPA Map of Radon Zones. Elevated-result share from the Michigan Indoor Radon Program.
Why choose us
Five reasons people here pick us as their Grosse Pointe Park 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
Ora from Trademark did an incredible job with the inspection and sewer scope of the home I am in the process of buying. He was very thorough, explained everything to me from the start, and made it all super easy to understand which definitely helped to put me at ease a bit more. Highly recommend this company!
Mariah HartmanWestland, MIJim was prompt and thorough during the mold testing. Clearly gave us an explanation about mold and testing process he was going to conduct. Testing was followed by a written report. I would recommend everyone use a third party to test mold, independent from the company conducting remediation work. I would hire Trademark again and strongly recommend them.
Alberto PicconeNorthville, MICowboy “Jim” just did Mold Testing in my parents’ basement. He was Professional, explained the what, how and yet of everything to my Senior parents. Our results came back super quick. He even referred us to the resources on the Trademark website for me to use to fix the leaky basement. It’s 1 stop shopping with Trademark.
Becky JohnsonWayne, MIWhat happens
Questions
Yes. The City requires a Certificate of Occupancy whenever there is a change of ownership of a home or business, or on new residential construction. The City inspector must inspect the property, and all code violations must be corrected before the certificate is issued. Inspections are by appointment only and the City asks for at least two weeks notice.
Two years from the date of the initial inspection. That is unusual — most point-of-sale certificates in this region expire on the next change of ownership rather than on a clock. If you are buying, it is worth asking when the current certificate was issued as well as whether one exists.
The City publishes fees payable in advance of the scheduled inspection: $200 for a single-family residence, $300 for a two-family, $350 for a three-family and $400 for a four-family. Confirm current figures with the Building Department when you book.
No. The City’s inspection is a compliance check that decides whether a certificate can be issued, and it reports to the City. It is not an assessment of the roof, the heating and cooling equipment, the foundation, the drainage or the electrical service. A buyer’s inspection looks at the building as a whole and reports to you. Plan for both, and start the City’s first because of the lead time.
Because it changes which set of requirements applies. One- and two-family homes under 3,500 square feet of calculated floor area follow the residential permit requirements. Above that, they follow the commercial requirements — which means a plan review approval letter, with plan review approved before a building permit can be issued. In a city with this many large older houses, that threshold catches a real number of properties.
More than most people assume. The City names additions, decks, sheds, garages, fencing, installation of furnaces and air conditioning units, installation of hot tubs and pools, and installation of water heaters — alongside all new projects and most remodeling. Applications go through the online system, though payments are made at the counter or by drop box.
Very old. Of about 4,845 housing units, 2,863 — nearly three in five — were built before 1940, and around 76% is single-family detached. Everything modern in those houses was added later by different people at different times, which is why the junctions between eras are where an inspection concentrates.
Yes, and this is one of the strongest cases in the region. On most houses in this city the lateral went in before 1940, with mature street trees over it for the whole of that time. It is the one component no visual inspection reaches and it is not what the City’s certificate inspection is for. 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.
More on cost, timing and what is included on the FAQ page.
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Permits, assessing and property records for Grosse Pointe Park are handled by Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, not by us.
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October 22, 2017
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