Ypsilanti Township, Michigan
Looking for a Ypsilanti Township home inspector? We do certified home, commercial, mold and radon inspections in Ypsilanti Township, 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 Ypsilanti Township 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 Ypsilanti Township and across Washtenaw 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 Ypsilanti Township 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 reportYpsilanti Township housing stock
Ypsilanti Township has roughly 23,856 housing units and about 60% 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 1970s — 5,304 homes, around 22% of the town.
The median owner-occupied home here is valued at $204,800. There are around 875 manufactured and mobile homes in Ypsilanti Township. Those are a different inspection — the questions are about the frame, the anchoring and the skirting rather than a basement. Around 1,002 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 Ypsilanti Township 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 Ypsilanti Township was built
80% of homes here run on utility gas, and 67 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 243 use bottled or LP gas.
Local knowledge
There is one Ypsilanti Township rule that surprises almost everybody, and it has nothing to do with landlords.
The Township requires that all vacant structures unoccupied for more than 30 days be registered, inspected and certified — and it states explicitly that this includes unoccupied homes offered for sale. An empty listing that sits on the market past a month is not just slow; it carries an obligation, and the Township lists fines, additional fees, an administrative search warrant and potential legal action among the consequences of ignoring it.
It draws a sensible line around it too: vacant does not mean a house that is temporarily empty while the residents are away on vacation, tending to personal matters or business, or a property the owner did not intend to leave vacant. The target is genuinely unoccupied buildings.
The housing behind it spans five decades fairly evenly. Of about 23,856 units, the 1970s is the largest single decade at 5,304, with 3,690 from the 1950s, 3,450 from the 1990s, 3,203 from the 1960s and 3,097 from the 2000s. Around 60% is single-family detached.
Before you buy
Vacant, rented, or neither
The Township runs two certificate programs, and between them they catch a lot of transactions that people assume are unaffected.
On the rental side, single family homes, duplexes and multiple family units that are rented or available for rent must be registered, inspected and certified, and no unit may be leased without it. Certification runs on a two-year cycle, a tenant may request a copy of the certificate, and the Township notes the certificate may be suspended or revoked within that two years if serious code violations come to light through a complaint investigation or police involvement. On a sale, the law requires the Township to be told that the property sold and to whom, and the certificate is closed at that point.
On the vacant side, the 30-day rule applies to houses, businesses and vacant commercial spaces in retail centers alike, and explicitly to unoccupied homes offered for sale.
What both produce is a Certificate of Compliance: the Township confirming that a property meets its property maintenance ordinance and the International Property Maintenance Code, with the inspection focused on safety, blight and the condition of utilities. That is not a condition report and it is not written for you. A buyer’s inspection is independent, commissioned and paid for by you, and covers the roof, structure, foundation, drainage, electrical, heating and cooling, plumbing and the accessible interior — what is failing, what is near the end of its service life, and what to plan for.
A practical note from the same page, worth knowing if you are the one arranging access: the Township charges a $30 re-inspection fee for each return trip, and a lock out or no-show fee equal to the inspection fee if nobody is there. Appointments can be moved free of charge with four business days’ notice. Where a property is bank owned or listed with a lock box, the code can be supplied by a responsible party and the inspector will let themselves in; where entry is refused, the Township can apply to a District Court judge for an administrative search warrant, at the owner’s cost.
Something no other township on this list has
Ypsilanti Township owns and operates the Ford Lake Hydro Station, which makes it the only municipality we write about that runs a hydroelectric dam.
It publishes what that entails. The Ford Lake Dam is federally regulated and carries a high hazard classification, and because of that classification the Township is required to maintain an Emergency Action Plan, which it says is updated and tested annually. It also maintains, with Huron Valley Ambulance, an Everbridge reverse-911 database for residents in the floodplain near the dam — a list you have to sign up for, and one the Township asks new residents to join by getting in touch with Hydro Operations.
The Township’s own assessment of the risk belongs here alongside all of that: the likelihood of a dam failure, it says, is very remote, but it must be prepared for such a situation. We are not going to put it any more dramatically than the people who operate the dam do.
For a buyer the practical points are small and worth doing. Whether a particular property sits in a mapped floodplain is a question for the flood maps and your insurer, not for a home inspection, and we would not suggest otherwise. If it does, getting onto the notification list and having an evacuation route is free and takes an afternoon.
What an inspection covers is how the building itself handles the water that reaches it: accessible grading, gutters and downspouts and their discharge points, foundation conditions, the basement or crawlspace, floor drains and any sump equipment, all recorded as found.
Permits and what they cover
The Township is specific about what needs a permit, and the list includes exactly the jobs homeowners tend to treat as maintenance.
A permit is needed for building a deck or porch, and for replacing a hot water tank or a furnace. The Building Department asks for a minimum of five to ten business days to review an application before work starts, and it makes a point worth repeating: if a contractor is doing the work, the contractor should pull the permit, which it describes as a safeguard for the homeowner, costing no more and taking no longer.
The required-inspection list is unusually thorough for a township — water and sewer installation, footings, backfill, final grade, mid-wall, underground plumbing, rough plumbing, rough electric, rough heating, rough frame, insulation, drywall, interior slabs and attached porches, fireplace, and then final plumbing, electric, heating and building. Final grade being on that list matters more than it sounds: it is the ground that decides whether water leaves the foundation or collects against it.
The Township also runs a public building permit search. It is worth ten minutes before an offer, with the standard caution we put on every one of these pages: a permit on file does not establish that work is in good condition today, and nothing on file does not establish that it was done badly. That is the gap an inspection fills.
The buried line
Neither certificate program, and no visual inspection, sees inside the buried lateral running from the house to the public sewer.
On a house from the 1970s that pipe has been in the ground about fifty years, and on one from the 1950s closer to seventy — long enough for tree roots to find a joint, for ground movement to displace 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 Ypsilanti Township 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 — and 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.
Local information from Ypsilanti Charter Township — rentals and vacant buildings · Ypsilanti Charter Township — Ford Lake Dam public safety and education · Ypsilanti Charter Township — Building Department. Municipal requirements change — verify current details with the municipality.
Radon in Washtenaw County
Zone 1 is the highest of the three EPA categories — the predicted average indoor level across the county is above the 4 pCi/L action level. What a zone cannot tell you is anything about one house: 38% of tests actually run in Washtenaw 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 · Washtenaw 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 Ypsilanti Township 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
Mr. Cahoon was very thorough inspecting the home I am interested in purchasing. He explained everything clearly as he went along. Went above and beyond crawling into the very small crawl space! Thank you!
Amy CaragayYpsilanti, 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
If it has been unoccupied for more than 30 days, yes. The Township requires all vacant structures unoccupied beyond that period to be registered, inspected and certified, and it states explicitly that this includes unoccupied homes offered for sale. It lists fines, additional fees, an administrative search warrant and potential legal action among the consequences of not doing so. A house temporarily empty because the residents are away on vacation or business is not what the ordinance is aimed at.
Where the vacant building registration and certificate stand, and who is completing it. That is a conversation with your title company and the Township’s ordinance department before closing rather than after. Separately, a house that has been standing empty and possibly unheated is worth inspecting carefully in its own right — plumbing, heating, the roof and any evidence of water entry all behave differently in an unoccupied building.
No. The Township states that the law requires it to be notified when a property is sold and to whom it transferred, and that the Certificate of Compliance is closed at that point. Certification runs on a two-year cycle for single family homes, duplexes and multiple family units, and the Township notes a certificate may be suspended or revoked within that period if serious code violations surface through a complaint investigation or police involvement.
No. The Township’s inspection enforces its property maintenance ordinance and the International Property Maintenance Code, focusing on safety, blight and the condition of utilities, and it produces a Certificate of Compliance. A buyer’s inspection is independent, paid for by you, and reports condition: the roof, structure, foundation, drainage, electrical, heating and cooling, plumbing and the accessible interior, with what is failing, what is near the end of its life and what to budget for. Neither does the other’s job.
Ypsilanti Township owns and operates the Ford Lake Hydro Station. The Township states that Ford Lake Dam is federally regulated with a high hazard classification, that this requires an Emergency Action Plan updated and tested annually, and that it maintains an Everbridge reverse-911 database for residents in the floodplain near the dam. Its own words on the risk are that the likelihood of a dam failure is very remote, but that it must be prepared. Whether a particular property is in the mapped floodplain is a question for the flood maps and your insurer, not something a home inspection determines.
No, they are separate governments with separate programs, and the housing is different too — around 60% of the Township is single-family detached against roughly 38% in the City. A rule or certificate requirement that applies on one side of that line does not necessarily apply on the other. Confirm which one an address falls in before relying on anything you have read about either.
The Township says yes — it lists replacing a hot water tank or furnace alongside decks and porches as work that needs a permit, and asks for a minimum of five to ten business days to review an application. It also advises that where a contractor is doing the work, the contractor should pull the permit, describing that as a safeguard for the homeowner that costs no more and takes no longer. There is a public permit search if you want to check what is on file for an address.
It is worth considering. No certificate program the Township runs, and no visual inspection of any kind, sees inside the buried lateral running from the house to the public sewer. On a house from the 1970s that pipe has been in the ground about fifty years, and on one from the 1950s closer to seventy. We will not guess a material from a build year — no authoritative source establishes what laterals here are generally made of. 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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From the blog
October 22, 2017
January 5, 2021
April 5, 2024
Your local Ypsilanti Township home inspector, seven days a week. Home inspection reports in 24 hours.
