Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan
Looking for a Grosse Pointe Shores home inspector? We do certified home, commercial, mold and radon inspections in Grosse Pointe Shores, 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 Shores 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 Shores 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 Shores 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 Shores housing stock
Grosse Pointe Shores has roughly 1,073 housing units and about 100% 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 309 homes, around 29% of the housing stock. At 100% 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 $641,500. 97% are owner-occupied, which is high even for this area.
Treat this as a starting list, not a diagnosis. A Grosse Pointe Shores 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 Shores was built
90% of homes here run on utility gas. Another 7 use bottled or LP gas.
Local knowledge
Grosse Pointe Shores requires a building permit for a longer list of work than almost any community we cover. Not just construction, additions, demolition and trade work — but also replacing or even repairing a roof, and installing or replacing a fence.
That matters twice over. If you are buying, it means a roof or fence done without a permit is a real gap in the record rather than a technicality, and it is worth asking the building department what has actually been permitted on the address. And if you are planning work after you move in, it means budgeting for permits on jobs you might reasonably have assumed were exempt.
The second thing to plan around is timing. Trade inspections happen on Tuesdays and Thursdays only, in windows of three or four hours, and the windows differ by trade — electrical in the afternoon, plumbing and mechanical from late morning. Two days a week is not much, and on a project needing several sign-offs it sets the pace of the whole job.
The third is the water account, which behaves differently here from most places. It is tied to the property rather than the person, billing is quarterly, and if you move you have to ask for a final bill — it does not close itself.
The housing is a coherent set: about 309 units from the 1950s and 256 from the 1960s, so over half the village was built inside twenty years. Every housing unit here is a detached house.
Before you buy
Permits
The building department sits on the second floor of the municipal building on Lake Shore Road and opens weekdays from eight until half past four, closing for an hour at lunch. Applications go in by email and the permit comes back by email with a link to pay online.
Its published list of work requiring a permit is the part worth reading twice. Construction or alteration of any structure. An addition. Demolition or moving a structure. Installing or altering any electrical, mechanical or plumbing equipment. Replacing or repairing a roof. Installing or replacing a fence.
Roof repair and fence replacement are the two that surprise people. In many communities those sit below the permit threshold entirely. Here they do not, which means the permit record for a property should be fuller than usual — and a gap in it is more informative than it would be elsewhere.
The village works with four inspectors: a department administrator, an electrical inspector, one person covering both plumbing and mechanical, and a building inspector with his own direct line. Inspections are booked through the department, and they run on Tuesdays and Thursdays in narrow windows that differ by trade.
Published forms include building, electrical, mechanical and plumbing permits, a contractor registration form, driveway and fence permits, a zoning variance and special land use petition, and a permit fee schedule. There is also an ordinance restricting dumpsters and pods — we could not read the document itself, so we will not summarize it, but if your plans involve a skip or a moving pod on the driveway, ask first.
A home inspection is not a code inspection or a permit search, and we do not present it as one. What we do is establish what is physically there and in what condition, so that the questions you take to the department are specific. A buyer’s inspection is the usual starting point, and commercial building inspections to the CCPIA standard are available where a building is commercial.
The water account
The village bills water and sewer quarterly, with roughly thirty days from the bill date to pay, and it states plainly that not receiving a bill does not waive any past due penalties.
The rule that catches people is about moving. If you leave the property, you must request a final water bill — it is not generated automatically when a sale completes. Sellers who forget can find the account still running against an address they no longer own.
Ownership of the liability is worth understanding too. The village says the bill is tied to the property, so the owner is the responsible party. A lease can make payment the tenant’s job, but the village is explicit that a lease does not necessarily remove the owner from that responsibility. And if a balance is ruled delinquent, part of it is moved onto the property taxes.
For a buyer, the practical step is short: confirm in writing that the account for the address is settled and that a final reading has been taken, before you close.
On rates, the village moved away from a tiered structure in July 2025 because the old bill confused people. Charges are now a flat rate per unit for water and another per unit for sewer, plus a fixed operational fee. A billable unit is 748 gallons, or a hundred cubic feet.
None of this is something an inspection covers. We raise it because it is free to sort out in advance and irritating to sort out afterwards.
The housing
About 565 of the roughly 1,073 units here went up in the 1950s and 1960s, with another 185 in the 1970s and around 115 predating 1940. The typical house is therefore sixty to seventy years old and has been through several full replacement cycles.
On stock of that era we pay particular attention to the electrical system. Original service capacity is very often the practical limit on what a modern household wants to run, panels are frequently overfilled with circuits added by different hands over the decades, and we look for double-tapped breakers, mixed wiring types meeting in the same box and ungrounded receptacles. In houses at the later end of that range, aluminum branch wiring is a live question and we report it wherever we find it.
Roof coverings will be two or three generations deep by now — which is exactly why the village permit record on roofs is a useful cross-check. Heating equipment is several replacements from the original, and how well each was fitted and vented matters more than how new the current one looks.
Plumbing on 1950s and 1960s houses has usually been renewed in part rather than in whole, so the material transitions where old meets new are where problems concentrate. Original galvanized supply, where it survives, corrodes internally and shows up as reduced flow long before it leaks.
Windows are a mixed picture: some original, some replaced once, occasionally both on the same house. Failed seals in double glazing show as clouding or deposits between the panes and we note them individually rather than as a blanket comment.
On the 115 or so pre-1940 houses the exercise is different again, with foundations of stone or early block whose condition depends far more on how water has been managed around the building than on how they were originally built. Radon testing and mold inspection and testing can be added to any visit.
The harbor
The village runs its own harbor and publishes an annual schedule of boat well fees — a well here being a berth, not a water source.
The schedule lists each well by number with its width, its length, catwalk length, mooring line size, whether 110 volt power is available, and the annual fee. Widths run from ten to twelve feet on the wells we looked at, with lengths of twenty-five feet and annual charges in the low thousands. There is a published harbor map as well.
If a berth is part of why you are buying here, treat it as a separate inquiry to the village rather than an assumption. Availability, eligibility and any waiting arrangements are questions for the harbor office, and we make no claim about them.
What we will say is that a property inspection covers the building, not the berth. Where a property has waterside structures we can see and safely reach, we look at them and report their visible condition, and we state plainly in the report where our access ended. Anything structural over water needs a specialist.
The village also runs a public safety department and its own court pages, so a good deal of what you might normally chase through a county is handled locally.
The buried line
The line running out from the building belongs to the owner, and no visual inspection reaches inside it. On a house from the 1950s or 1960s that pipe is sixty to seventy years old, and it is very often the oldest untouched component on the whole property.
We will not name a material from a build year. Nothing published establishes what lines here 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: roots, cracks, displaced joints, bellies or blockages where they exist, and a clear run where they do not. In an established village with mature street trees, roots are the common finding, and they give no warning at all until the day the drains back up.
It is also the one part of a purchase where an unknown can be turned into a known for a fixed, modest amount of effort on the day — which on housing of this age and value is a straightforward decision.
A camera inspection is added to the same appointment rather than booked separately, and we deliver a full written report with photographs, generally the same day. You can read what our clients say, browse answers to common questions, or get in touch about a specific address in Grosse Pointe Shores.
Local information from Grosse Pointe Shores — Building Department, permit requirements and inspection times · Grosse Pointe Shores — water billing, responsibility and final bills · Grosse Pointe Shores — permits and forms · Grosse Pointe Shores — 2026 schedule of marina well fees. 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 Shores 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 Shores 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
The village lists replacing or repairing a roof among the work requiring a permit, along with installing or replacing a fence. Both sit below the threshold in many communities but not here, so check before starting.
Tuesdays and Thursdays only, in windows of three to four hours that differ by trade — electrical in the afternoon, plumbing and mechanical from late morning. Plan multi-stage work around that.
The owner. The village states the bill is tied to the property itself, and that while a lease can make payment the tenant’s responsibility, it does not necessarily remove the owner’s.
The village states that if a balance is ruled delinquent, a portion of it is transferred to the property taxes. Confirm in writing that the account for the address is settled before closing.
Yes. You must request a final water bill — it is not produced automatically. The village also notes that not receiving a bill does not waive past due penalties.
748 gallons, or one hundred cubic feet. Since July 2025 the village charges a flat rate per unit for water and another per unit for sewer, plus a fixed operational fee.
The village publishes an annual schedule listing each boat well by number with its width, length, catwalk, mooring line size, power availability and fee. A well here means a berth, not a water source. Availability is a question for the village.
On a house from the 1950s or 1960s, yes. The drain line is sixty years old or more, no visual inspection reaches inside it, and mature street trees make roots the common finding. A camera inspection goes on the same visit.
More on cost, timing and what is included on the FAQ page.
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From the blog
October 22, 2017
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