Novi, Michigan
Looking for a Novi home inspector? We do certified home, commercial, mold and radon inspections in Novi, 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 Novi 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 Novi 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 Novi 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 reportNovi housing stock
Novi has roughly 28,027 housing units and about 52% of them are single-family detached. Housing that went up mostly in one era has mostly one era’s problems — which is genuinely useful to know before you buy, because it tells you what to look at first.
Most of it went up in the 1990s — 6,515 homes, around 23% of the town. It is also less detached-house territory than most of the area at 52%, so condominiums, duplexes and small multi-family buildings are a bigger share of what we inspect here — and those bring their own questions about what is yours to maintain and what belongs to the association.
The median owner-occupied home here is valued at $380,200. There are around 1,690 manufactured and mobile homes in Novi. Those are a different inspection — the questions are about the frame, the anchoring and the skirting rather than a basement. Around 1,543 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.
None of this is a prediction about a particular house. It is where a Novi home inspector starts looking in a home of this age, and what we photograph and write up either way.
Housing figures: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2022 five-year estimates.
When Novi was built
87% of homes here run on utility gas, and 10 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 353 use bottled or LP gas.
Local knowledge
Two things set Novi apart, and neither is about the age of the houses.
The first is what half the city actually is. The median build year here is 1992, so this is a modern community — but only about 52% of its roughly 28,027 housing units are single-family detached. That is a lower detached share than several much older cities in this region. Around 23% of units date from the 1990s, 19% from the 2000s, 19% from the 1970s and 17% from the 1980s. So a buyer here is roughly as likely to be purchasing a condominium or attached home as a detached house.
The second is what you are allowed to do with the land afterwards, and it catches people. Novi applies wetland and woodland review to ordinary residential projects — not just to subdivisions. That is covered below, and it is worth understanding before you buy a property with a deck or a pool in mind.
On condition, the arithmetic is straightforward. A house built in 1992 is now over thirty years old, which is past the expected service life of an original roof covering, furnace, air conditioning condenser and water heater. Whether those have been renewed is not something the build year can tell you.
Before you buy
The land
This is the most distinctive municipal requirement we have found in this region, and it applies to ordinary homeowners rather than developers.
Among the residential forms the City publishes is a Wetland/Woodland Affidavit, and the instruction attached to it is unambiguous: it must be completed for any residential work, with the City listing new homes, additions, decks and pools as examples. There is also a Woodland Review Application for an individual lot, alongside a grading template and a land improvement plot plan checklist.
Read that as a buyer and it changes the order of your questions. Before you commit to a property because the garden has room for a pool or the back of the house is crying out for a deck, it is worth establishing with Community Development what wetland or woodland review would apply to that particular lot. The answer is property-specific and the City is the authority on it — we would not guess, and an inspection does not determine it.
What an inspection does cover on the outside is how the property currently manages water: accessible grading, gutters and downspouts and where they discharge, foundation conditions, the basement or crawlspace and sump equipment where present, documented as found. On lots where the City takes wetlands and woodlands seriously, how the ground around a house actually behaves is worth looking at carefully.
What you are actually buying
For a city with a 1992 median build year, the housing mix here is genuinely unusual.
Only about 52% of Novi’s housing units are single-family detached. The rest is condominiums, attached homes and multi-unit buildings, which means a large share of buyers are purchasing something where the roof, the exterior envelope, the common structure and often shared mechanicals belong to an association rather than to them.
That changes what an inspection is for. The systems inside the unit are generally yours; what is outside it usually is not. A finding still matters either way, but who has to act on it — and who pays into the reserve that funds it — depends on which side of that boundary it falls. Tell us the property type when you book so the inspection is scoped properly from the start.
For a detached house, a home buyer inspection covers the full envelope and every major system: roof, structure, foundation, drainage, electrical, heating and cooling, plumbing and the accessible interior, photographed and written up with how urgent each finding is.
What the City does and does not check
This one is worth being precise about, because the paperwork names are misleading if you only skim them.
The City publishes a Certificate of Occupancy request for single-family homes and another for multi-family residential. Both sit on the forms and permits page under new home construction, beside the new home packet, with the instruction that you complete the form when you would like to request occupancy and a note that the Building Department needs two days to process it. They are the final step of building a house, not a condition of selling one.
We found no residential point-of-sale inspection requirement in Novi. Confirm the position for a specific address with Community Development, but do not plan around a municipal inspection of the house that may not exist.
The Building Division administers the Uniform Building, Plumbing, Mechanical and Housing Codes and the National Electrical Code, and the City runs an online inspection portal covering building, electrical, plumbing and heating inspections. If a seller has work in progress, that is where its inspection history lives — with the usual caution that a permit does not establish that work is in good condition today, and nothing on file does not establish that it was done badly.
The buried line
A 1992 house has had less exposure than a 1925 one. It has not had none.
The private sewer lateral runs underground from the house to the public system and no visual inspection can see inside it, whatever the build year. Three decades is long enough for trees planted when the subdivision went in to reach a joint, for ground to settle around backfill and leave a belly, or for a line to be damaged during later landscaping — which, in a city where a fair amount of outdoor work happens, is a real possibility.
We will not name a material from a build year, because no authoritative source establishes what Novi laterals are generally made of. 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. On a newer property it often confirms a clean line, which is worth having in writing. It goes on the same visit.
The rest fits that appointment too: commercial building inspections to the CCPIA standard for offices, retail, multifamily and warehouse property, and radon testing or mold inspection and testing added to a residential or commercial visit.
Local information from City of Novi — forms and permits · City of Novi — Community Development · City of Novi — inspections online portal. 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. A zone is a prediction of an average, and nobody lives in 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 · 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 Novi 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
Trademark is incredibly thorough! The ONLY inspectors I would trust with my home! From setting the appointment to climbing into the attic and crawling under the house, they are incredibly talented. Please do yourself the best favor, and always use and recommend Trademark!!
Paige CookNovi, MIMitch from Trademark Inspection Services conducted our new home inspection. He arrived on time and explained everything in detail and gave a Detailed report by end of the day. Thank you for an excellent home inspection !!
Sreenivasulu BajjiNovi, 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
Very possibly more than you expect. Among the City’s residential forms is a Wetland/Woodland Affidavit, which the City states must be completed for any residential work — listing new homes, additions, decks and pools as examples — alongside a Woodland Review Application for an individual lot. That is unusual: most communities apply wetland and woodland review to developments rather than to a homeowner adding a deck. What applies to a particular lot is a question for Community Development, and it is worth asking before you buy a property with building plans in mind.
The median build year is 1992, so most of Novi is modern by this region’s standards — about 23% of units date from the 1990s, 19% from the 2000s, 19% from the 1970s and 17% from the 1980s. But a 1992 house is now over thirty years old, which is past the expected service life of an original roof covering, furnace, air conditioning condenser and water heater. Each of those has either been replaced already or is running past its design life, and the build year cannot tell you which. That is what an inspection establishes.
We found no residential point-of-sale requirement. Novi does publish Certificate of Occupancy requests for single-family and multi-family homes, which are easy to mistake for resale documents — but on the City’s forms page they sit under new home construction, beside the new home packet, to be completed when requesting occupancy of a newly built home, with a two-day processing notice. Confirm for a specific address with Community Development, and in the meantime plan on your own inspection being the one examining the property on your behalf.
It comes up often here. Only about 52% of Novi’s roughly 28,027 housing units are single-family detached, which is a low share for a city with a 1992 median build year, so a great many buyers are purchasing a condominium or attached home. In that case the systems inside the unit are generally yours, while the roof, exterior envelope, common structure and shared mechanicals belong to the association. The inspection covers what serves your unit and what is accessible — knowing which side of that boundary a finding falls on is what decides whose problem it is. Tell us the property type when you book.
It is worth considering. Three decades is far less exposure than eighty years, but it is not none: trees planted when a subdivision went in have had time to reach a joint, ground settles around backfill and can leave a belly, and later landscaping work can damage a line. The lateral is buried and no visual inspection sees inside it regardless of age, and we would not guess a material from a build year. Putting a camera down the line answers it directly, and on a newer house it frequently confirms a clean run, which is worth having in writing. It is added to the same appointment.
The City runs an online inspection portal covering building, electrical, plumbing and heating inspections, and its Building Division administers the Uniform Building, Plumbing, Mechanical and Housing Codes together with the National Electrical Code. If a seller has work in progress or recently completed, that is where the inspection history sits. Read it as context rather than proof: a permit does not establish that work is in good condition today, and nothing on file does not establish that it was done badly.
Yes. You can book a Novi home inspector with us seven days a week, and we cover the rest of Oakland County too.
A home inspection report reaches you within 24 hours. Commercial buildings are 24 to 72 hours depending on size, a radon result comes at the end of the 48-hour test, and mold samples come back from the lab in one to three business days.
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 Novi home inspector and not sure we reach you? Call 734-331-3269 and we will tell you.
Permits, assessing and property records for Novi are handled by the City of Novi, not by us.
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Your local Novi home inspector, seven days a week. Home inspection reports in 24 hours.
