Harper Woods, Michigan
Looking for a Harper Woods home inspector? We do certified home, commercial, mold and radon inspections in Harper Woods, 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 Harper Woods 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 Harper Woods 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 Harper Woods 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 reportHarper Woods housing stock
Harper Woods has roughly 5,889 housing units and about 84% of them are single-family detached. Homes built in a single stretch tend to wear out in the same places at the same time. That is why when somewhere was built is the first thing worth knowing about it.
The busiest stretch of building here was the 1950s: 3,093 homes, about 53% of everything standing today.
The median owner-occupied home here is valued at $134,900.
None of this says anything about the specific house you are buying. It is the shortlist a Harper Woods home inspector works through in a home of this age, and every item on it gets photographed and written up whichever way it turns out.
Housing figures: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2022 five-year estimates.
When Harper Woods was built
86% of homes here run on utility gas. Another 42 use bottled or LP gas.
Local knowledge
Two things define property here, and they compound each other. The City requires a Certificate of Occupancy on transfer, and more than half its housing was built in the 1950s.
Of about 5,889 units, 3,093 date from the 1950s and another 1,082 from the 1940s — some 71% of the city built inside two decades. Only ten units have been built since 2000. This is a postwar city that has stayed one.
On the transfer side, the City’s published Certificate of Occupancy procedures state that a certificate is required for all properties, that residential certificates are valid for one year or until the property is sold or transferred, and that certificates expire on any change in use, ownership or occupancy and are not transferable. Getting one means passing a property maintenance and life safety inspection through the Building Department.
So a sale here triggers a municipal inspection, and the building being inspected is seventy years old. That is a combination worth planning for rather than discovering, and the planning starts with knowing what the City looks at — and what it does not.
Before you buy
The certificate of occupancy
The City’s Building Department handles certificates of occupancy, property maintenance, residential code enforcement and residential rental inspections. Its published Certificate of Occupancy procedures set out how the process runs, and it is worth confirming the current version with the department directly — a document like this gets revised, and what follows is a summary rather than today’s checklist.
The shape of it: the applicant schedules the initial inspection and every follow-up, with 24 hours notice required. If the inspector issues a list of corrections, those must be made and re-inspected — for residential properties, before occupancy. Inspectors do not return automatically; you call. Where applicable, repairs must be carried out by licensed contractors. And on rental property, homeowner permits may not be issued at all — a licensed contractor is required for any work needing a permit.
The line that catches people out is about history: work found to have been done without permits, no matter how long ago, requires that a permit be issued and the appropriate inspections completed, or the violation removed. In a city where most houses are seventy years old and have been altered by several owners, that is not a hypothetical.
The inspection itself covers property maintenance and life safety rather than the whole building. Its published checklist runs to address numbers of at least four inches visible from the centerline of the street, foundation walls kept plumb and free from open cracks, handrails and guards able to take a 200 pound lateral load, screens on openings, heating capable of 68 degrees in habitable rooms, smoke alarms in each sleeping room and on each level, and a long list of specific plumbing and electrical items.
What it is not is an assessment of the building for you. The City is checking the property against a maintenance and safety code; it is not evaluating the roof’s remaining life, the furnace’s condition, the structure, or the drainage. A buyer’s inspection covers the roof, structure, foundation, drainage, electrical, heating and cooling, plumbing and the accessible interior, and reports to you. Plan for both; they answer different questions.
One practical note on who you will be dealing with: the Chief Building Official listed by the City works for a contracted code services provider rather than as in-house staff. That is common in cities this size and says nothing about the standard of the work — it is simply useful to know when you are chasing a file or a re-inspection.
Seventy-year-old wiring
You can read a lot about a city’s housing from what its inspectors are told to look for. Harper Woods publishes a checklist that includes the instruction that screw-in fuses must be type S only.
That single line tells you fuse panels are still in service here. Type S fuses are the rejection-base kind — once fitted with the adapter, a 15 amp circuit will not accept a 20 or 30 amp fuse. The reason the requirement exists is that the ordinary Edison-base fuse will accept anything, and over-fusing a circuit is one of the classic ways a house of this era catches fire.
The rest of the electrical checklist reads the same way. Every habitable space must have at least two separate and remote receptacle outlets — a requirement that only needs stating where rooms with one outlet exist. Laundry areas and bathrooms need ground fault protection, as do kitchen outlets within six feet of the sink. Painted-over switches and outlets have to be replaced. All of these are the signatures of original 1950s wiring that has been added to rather than replaced.
On a house of this age, what we are looking at is the whole electrical picture rather than a compliance list: the service size and its condition, the panel and how it has been added to, the type and condition of the branch wiring where it is visible, grounding, and the junctions where newer work meets original. A 1950s house that has been partially rewired often has a modern-looking panel feeding original circuits, which is precisely the situation a walkthrough cannot detect.
The same checklist is specific about a few other things worth knowing: cooking appliances may not be used to provide space heating; fireplaces may require a visual safety inspection by a licensed contractor; bedroom doors may not have keyed locks and emergency escape openings must operate from inside without keys or tools; exterior hose bibs need vacuum breakers; a dishwasher needs an air gap on the drain; a bathroom needs a fan vented outside or an operable window; and a dryer must vent through metal pipe over a run of less than twenty-five feet.
Lead in drinking water
Harper Woods publishes a water safety page and a public advisory about lead, and the City is careful about what the numbers mean. So are we.
The City states that changes to the Michigan Safe Drinking Water Act added new sampling rules, and that these require communities with lead service lines and older housing stock — Harper Woods among them — to do more sampling. Critically, it explains that the new method is expected to produce higher lead results not because the water source or quality has changed, but because the Act sets more stringent sampling and analysis procedures. The City has been testing for lead and copper since 1992, and reports that four of thirty targeted sites with known lead service lines returned elevated results.
Two things follow for a buyer. The first is that Harper Woods has known lead service lines — the City says so plainly, and the housing age makes it unsurprising, since the materials in question were normal when this city was built. The second is that whether a particular address has one is a question for the City, not something anyone should infer from a build year.
We do not test water. Water testing is a separate discipline with its own certified laboratories, and the City links the state list of them. Nothing in a building inspection substitutes for a water test, and we will not tell you what is in a pipe we have not seen.
What an inspection contributes is an observation of the visible supply piping — what it appears to be where the service enters the building, and along accessible runs in a basement or crawlspace, including where visible piping is galvanized rather than copper or plastic. That narrows the question. The City’s water safety page and its advisory are where the authoritative answers live, alongside the state and county resources it links.
The buried line
The sewer lead running from a Harper Woods house to the main was, for most of the city, laid in the 1940s or 1950s along with everything else. Seventy years later it is the one component no visual inspection reaches.
That is long enough for roots to have found a joint, for ground movement to have displaced 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 Harper Woods leads are generally made of — the City’s code of ordinances is the place to start if you want the local requirements in full.
Given that the City already requires an inspection at transfer, 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, 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 City of Harper Woods — Building Department · City of Harper Woods — water safety and lead · City of Harper Woods — code of ordinances · Harper Woods Building Department — published procedures for obtaining a Certificate of Occupancy. 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 Harper Woods is not where the state’s worst readings turn up, and we would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise. 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. A zone is an average taken across a whole county, and no house is an average.
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 Harper Woods 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 City’s published procedures state that a Certificate of Occupancy is required for all properties, that residential certificates are valid for one year or until the property is sold or transferred, and that certificates expire on any change in use, ownership or occupancy and are not transferable. Obtaining one requires passing a property maintenance and life safety inspection through the Building Department. Confirm current requirements and fees with the department directly — procedures get revised.
No. The City’s inspection checks the property against a property maintenance and life safety code — address numbers, handrails, screens, smoke alarms, specific electrical and plumbing items. It is not an assessment of the roof’s remaining life, the furnace’s condition, the structure, or the drainage, and it is not reported to you. A buyer’s inspection covers the building as a whole and answers to you. Plan for both.
The City takes a hard line: work found to have been done without permits, no matter how long ago, requires that a permit be issued and the appropriate inspections completed, or the violation removed. In a city where most houses are seventy years old and have passed through several owners, this is worth asking about before you are the one holding it.
Because fuse panels are still in service here, and type S fuses are the rejection-base kind. Once the adapter is fitted, a 15 amp circuit will not accept a 20 or 30 amp fuse. An ordinary Edison-base fuseholder will accept anything, and over-fusing a circuit is one of the classic ways a house of this era catches fire. It is a small requirement that tells you a lot about the electrical stock.
The City says it does. Its water safety page states that Safe Drinking Water Act changes require communities with lead service lines and older housing stock, Harper Woods among them, to do more sampling, and reports that four of thirty targeted sites with known lead service lines returned elevated results. The City also explains that higher results under the new method reflect more stringent sampling procedures rather than a change in water source or quality. Whether a particular address has a lead service line is a question for the City.
No. Water testing is a separate discipline with its own certified laboratories, and the City links the state list of them. What an inspection can report is what the visible supply piping appears to be where it is accessible — at the point the service enters the building and along exposed runs — which narrows the question without answering it.
Overwhelmingly postwar. Of about 5,889 housing units, 3,093 were built in the 1950s and 1,082 in the 1940s — roughly 71% of the city inside two decades — with 775 from the 1960s. Only ten units have been built since 2000, and around 84% is single-family detached. Expect original-era wiring and plumbing behind whatever has been updated on the surface.
Yes. For most of the city the sewer lead was laid in the 1940s or 1950s along with the house, and seventy years is long enough for roots, ground movement or a forgotten repair to have changed what is down there. 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 — covering the one thing the City’s own inspection does not.
More on cost, timing and what is included on the FAQ page.
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