Lake Orion, Michigan
Looking for a Lake Orion home inspector? We do certified home, commercial, mold and radon inspections in Lake Orion, 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 Lake Orion 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 Lake Orion and across Oakland 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 Lake Orion 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 reportLake Orion housing stock
Lake Orion has roughly 1,444 housing units and about 72% 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 540 homes, around 37% of the housing stock.
The median owner-occupied home here is valued at $323,300.
Treat this as a starting list, not a diagnosis. A Lake Orion 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 Lake Orion was built
90% of homes here run on utility gas. Another 37 use bottled or LP gas.
Local knowledge
Lake Orion is a managed lake, and the Village manages it on two separate cycles that anyone buying near the water should know about.
Every fall the level is lowered by about a foot to reach its normal winter low, a process that starts in late October and is completed by the second Friday in November. The Village gives notice as a courtesy so people can get watercraft out safely.
Separately, and this is the one that matters for property, there is a drawdown every five years specifically so that docks and seawalls can be worked on. The Village is careful to distinguish the two, and notes that the annual one-foot lowering happens whether or not the drawdown does.
For a lakefront buyer that turns a vague worry into a schedule. If an inspection or a survey raises questions about a seawall or a dock, the practical window for doing something about it arrives on a five-year rhythm — so knowing where the cycle currently stands is worth a call to the Village before you plan anything.
The housing is old. Of roughly 1,444 units, 540 — 37% — predate 1940, and the entire 1960s accounts for only eight recorded units. About 72% is single-family detached.
Before you buy
The lake
The Village’s lake and dam management notices are worth reading before you buy anything on or near the water.
The annual lowering is straightforward: about a foot, starting in late October, finished by the second Friday in November, and timed so it does not flood Paint Creek. It is announced so owners can remove watercraft safely.
The five-year drawdown is a different thing entirely, and the Village is explicit that it exists so docks and seawalls can be repaired. That is a genuinely rare piece of municipal planning, and it is the single most useful fact on this page for anyone buying waterfront property.
It also sets expectations honestly. Work on a seawall or a dock is not something you schedule for a convenient Saturday; it happens when the water allows. If you are looking at a property where the shoreline structures are visibly tired, that is a timing question as much as a financial one.
We should be clear about our own limits here. A home inspection does not evaluate seawalls, docks or shoreline structures, and we do not assess a dam. What we report is what the site and the building show: the fall of the ground between the building and the water, where downspouts and any sump discharge appear to go, soft ground or standing water we can see, and what the lowest level of the house shows about water that has been there before.
On near-water property that last point carries more weight than usual. The water table is closer, seasonal levels move by design here, and a basement or crawl space that behaves in August is not necessarily the same one in April.
Water supply
The Village’s water system page describes an arrangement worth understanding. The Village does not buy its water directly from the regional authority. It purchases from Orion Township through three metered connections with pressure reducing valves, and the Township owns and operates those meters and valves.
Behind the Township sits the regional authority, which treats water drawn from Lake Huron and the Detroit River at five plants and supplies 126 communities. So the chain runs from a Great Lake, through a regional plant, through the Township, through three metered connections, into a Village distribution system whose origins go back to the early 1940s and which today runs to roughly 95,000 feet of main in sizes from four to sixteen inches.
Pressure reducing valves in that chain mean water arrives at the Village at a managed pressure. On an inspection we run fixtures and report on functional flow and drainage — whether the supply keeps up when more than one thing is running, and how the drains behave under that load. Unusual pressure is something we describe rather than diagnose.
The Village also reproduces the regional authority’s reminder about what customers are responsible for, and it is practical advice worth repeating: run water that has not been used for a while, clean faucet aerators and shower heads, and flush hot water heaters.
All three of those show up in an inspection. Aerators clogged with sediment affect flow at a fixture and are trivially cleaned. A water heater that has never been flushed behaves differently from one that has. And a house that has been standing empty — a vacant listing, for example — is exactly the case the first instruction is written for.
We do not test water. Water testing goes through a certified laboratory, and questions about the supply itself go to the Village, which publishes its consumer confidence report.
Prewar housing
With 540 units predating 1940 and effectively nothing built in the 1960s, most inspections here are of buildings that have been altered repeatedly over eight or nine decades.
Electrical shows it first. The original service was sized for lighting and very little else. Nearly all have been upgraded, but upgrades range from a genuine rewire to a new panel with original distribution still behind it, and circuits added in stages by different hands are common. What matters is the coherence and quality of what has been done since, not the date on the panel.
Plumbing follows the same pattern: supply lines replaced in part rather than in whole, leaving material transitions worth examining, and drain and vent layouts frequently original with newer fixtures attached to them.
Then insulation, ventilation and heating — all retrofitted into buildings designed without them, sometimes with venting that has not kept pace with a newer appliance. Roofs on this stock are on their fourth or fifth covering. Foundations and basements have had eighty or ninety years of freeze, thaw and a nearby lake to contend with.
Many of these houses began as lake property rather than as year-round homes, and that history concentrates the interesting findings in predictable places: thin or absent insulation in spaces nobody has opened, shallow or light foundations, and plumbing routed through unheated space on a path that made sense when a building was closed up each fall.
None of that makes an old Lake Orion house a poor buy. A great many have been carefully converted and are excellent. But the difference between a well-kept one and a neglected one is not visible from the street, and establishing which you are looking at is most of what a buyer’s inspection is for.
Planning
The Village contracts its planning and zoning services to an outside firm, with the Village Manager serving as zoning administrator and sitting on the planning commission.
It also offers something genuinely useful and free. The Village states that almost all building and property improvements require some form of application and review, and that early, informal and free reviews of proposed projects are available to help avoid mistakes and delays. On an old house where an inspection has raised something structural, that conversation costs nothing and happens before anyone pays for drawings.
One scheduling quirk is worth knowing. The planning and zoning coordinator’s published hours are split across two buildings on the same day — part of Tuesday at the Orion Township office and the rest at the Village office — with a virtual window on Thursday by appointment. Call before you travel.
A buyer’s inspection is not a permit search and does not assess zoning compliance. What it does is give you the list of things worth raising: an addition, a finished basement, a converted porch, a deck, a replaced furnace. On housing this old, that list is usually longer than on a modern subdivision, and the free review is a sensible next step for anything substantial.
The buried line
The sanitary line from the building to the main belongs to the owner. On one of the 540 prewar houses here that pipe may have been in the ground close to a century, under a village lot with mature planting over it.
Ground near a lake holds more water than ground elsewhere, and groundwater finds any opening in a buried drain line. A cracked or displaced joint that would merely be a slow drain somewhere drier can take on real volume here — and with the lake level moving by a foot on an annual cycle, the water table around a property is not a fixed thing.
We will not name a material from a build year, because no authoritative source establishes what Lake Orion laterals 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. It is added to the same appointment rather than booked separately, and on this housing stock it is among the most useful things you can buy before closing.
Alongside it we offer radon testing, mold inspection and testing — worth considering on any property with a history of moisture in the lowest level — and commercial building inspections to the CCPIA standard.
You can read what our clients say, look through answers to common questions, or get in touch about a specific address in Lake Orion.
Local information from Village of Lake Orion — lake and dam management, annual lowering and the five-year drawdown · Village of Lake Orion — water system, supply arrangements and customer responsibilities · Village of Lake Orion — planning and development, and free informal project reviews. Municipal requirements change — verify current details with the municipality.
Radon in Oakland County
Zone 2 is the middle EPA category — the predicted average indoor level across the county sits between 2 and 4 pCi/L. What a zone cannot tell you is anything about one house: 29% of tests actually run in Oakland County still came back at or above the EPA’s 4 pCi/L action level. 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 · Oakland 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 Lake Orion 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
Noah was professional, efficient and extremely knowledgeable!
Rick MurphyLake Orion, 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, 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, MIWhat happens
Questions
The Village lowers Lake Orion by about a foot each year to reach its normal winter low water mark, beginning in late October and completing by the second Friday in November. Notice is given as a courtesy so residents can remove watercraft safely, and the lowering is timed so it does not flood Paint Creek.
A separate and larger drawdown that the Village says takes place every five years specifically so that docks and seawalls can be repaired. It is distinct from the annual one-foot lowering, which happens whether or not a drawdown does. If you are buying waterfront property, knowing where the cycle stands is worth a call to the Village.
No. A home inspection does not evaluate seawalls, docks or shoreline structures, and we do not assess dams. We report what the site and the building show — the fall of the ground between the building and the water, where downspouts and sump discharges appear to go, and what the lowest level shows about water that has been there before.
The Village purchases its water from Orion Township through three metered connections with pressure reducing valves, which the Township owns and operates. Behind that sits the regional authority, which treats water from Lake Huron and the Detroit River. The Village’s own distribution system dates from the early 1940s.
The Village reproduces the regional authority’s advice: run water that has not been used for a while, clean faucet aerators and shower heads, and flush hot water heaters. All three are things we look at on an inspection, and the first matters particularly on a house that has been standing empty.
Older than most. About 540 of roughly 1,444 units — 37% — predate 1940, and the entire 1960s accounts for only eight recorded units. Many of the older houses began as lake property rather than year-round homes, which concentrates the interesting findings in insulation, foundations and the routing of plumbing.
Yes, and it is free. The Village states that early, informal reviews of proposed projects are available and help avoid mistakes and delays. Note that the planning and zoning coordinator’s hours are split between the Township office and the Village office on the same day, so call before traveling.
On this housing stock, yes. The lateral belongs to the owner, on a prewar house it may have been in the ground close to a century, and ground near a lake whose level moves by design holds more water — which finds any opening in a buried pipe. A camera inspection documents roots, cracks, displaced joints, bellies or blockages, and is added to the same visit.
More on cost, timing and what is included on the FAQ page.
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