Blog > A WILD Home Inspection Story You Need To Hear
Stucco Inspection Surprise: A Denver Buyer's $100K Scare
When buying a higher-priced home in Colorado, you'll hire experts who sometimes contradict each other. Here's a real story about a stucco inspection that nearly killed a deal, and how we sorted out the truth.
What inspections should buyers get on a Colorado mountain home?
On a higher-priced mountain property, expect to pay $3,000 to $4,000 across 5 to 7 specialized inspections.
For a recent mountain home purchase, my buyers ran a general home inspection, radon test, mold test, septic inspection, water analysis (it was on a well), water flow rate test, air quality test, and a roof inspection. The home inspector also recommended a stucco inspection, which I'd never ordered in 15 years and roughly 1,000 transactions.
For context, a $300,000 Denver condo usually only needs a general inspection, radon, and a sewer scope. That covers 99% of your bases. But on a 5,000 square foot mountain home with a septic system, well water, and 20-year-old stucco, you're protecting a much bigger investment.
Budget accordingly. These inspections took about 3 weeks to schedule and complete because you're coordinating multiple companies. Plan for the timeline in your contract dates.
How much does a stucco inspection cost in Colorado?
A professional stucco inspection in Colorado runs around $1,200 and produces a report that can be 25+ pages long.
On this property, the stucco inspector delivered a 26-page report with multiple red-flagged sections. The findings included minor cracks around windows and a few small bubbled areas (we're talking inches, not feet) on a roughly 5,000 square foot house with 20-year-old stucco.
When I called the inspector to walk through the report, his verbal assessment was shocking. He said 90% of the stucco needed removal and replacement, and the cost would be well into six figures. That's a massive jump from what the report visually suggested.
Here's the catch. The inspector was quick to refer specific contractors to perform the repair work. That doesn't automatically mean anything shady, but it's worth knowing when you're weighing the advice. Always ask who benefits from the recommendation.
How do you handle conflicting contractor opinions during inspection?
Get at least 2 independent bids from contractors who don't have a referral relationship with the inspector.
After the inspector quoted six figures, I did some math. Full siding replacement on most Denver homes runs $15,000 to $25,000. A complete stucco redo on a single-level house topped out around $50,000 from the quotes I gathered. Six figures didn't add up.
So we sent two contractors to the property independently. The first contractor said he couldn't even write a bid because there was nothing wrong worth fixing. The second, a licensed general contractor I've worked with for years, reviewed the full report on site and said if it were his house, he wouldn't do a thing.
That's powerful. Both contractors would have made $5,000 to $10,000 in profit by taking the job. They had every financial reason to say yes. They said no. That tells you something.
Why do home inspectors and contractors disagree on repairs?
Inspectors are paid to identify potential issues, while contractors price actual repair work, creating very different incentives.
Inspectors get paid once per job, so flagging more items doesn't directly pay them more. But some inspectors refer work to specific contractors, which can create a quiet incentive loop. I'm not saying that's what happened here, just that it's worth being aware of.
Contractors who bid honestly often turn down work they don't believe in. A trusted general contractor protecting their reputation will tell you the truth, even when it costs them a job. That's the person you want in your corner.
The other conflict pattern is seller versus buyer contractors during inspection objection. Seller's contractor says it's fine. Buyer's contractor says replace it all. In that case, a neutral third opinion (sometimes the original inspector) helps break the tie. Gather information from multiple angles before deciding.
Should you trust your gut when buying a Denver home?
Yes, but only after gathering at least 2 to 3 independent professional opinions to inform that gut feeling.
My buyers ultimately trusted the contractors over the stucco inspection report. The stucco had 20 years of mild wear, normal for a mountain property, and two independent professionals said it didn't need significant work. That matched what my buyer felt walking through the home.
Gut feeling matters at two points in the process. First, when you know a house is the one (and you usually do). Second, when professional opinions conflict and you have to make a judgment call. But gut alone isn't enough on a six-figure decision.
The right approach is collecting as much information as possible from people with different incentives, then weighing it. Sometimes there's no clean right answer. You make the best educated decision you can with the data in front of you, and you move forward.
Video Chapters
Full Video Transcript
Full transcript from this video, organized by chapter. Click any timestamp to jump to that moment in the video.
Buying a House Overview
[0:00] Look, buying a house is one of the most stressful things that you're going to do in your adult life. And you're going to hire a lot of people that are experts to help you through this process, right? Of course, you got your agent, you're going to have home inspectors, uh maybe you have multiple home inspectors, you've got an appraisal, uh you got your uncle Bob who hasn't bought a property in 25 years, but decides that he's an expert.
[0:20] And during this process, you might get some conflicting information. And just recently, I had an amazing situation happen, right? And I've been in this business for 15 years. I've done, I don't know, 500 to a,000ish transactions. Uh, and every transaction I generally learn something new. So, about a couple months ago, um, was working with some buyers and we were doing some home tours. We were looking in the mountains and we ended up finding the one, right? And you know when it's the one because your gut tells you it's the one. And that's your biggest thing that you need to trust in this world is your gut and got it under contract.
Getting Conflicting Information
[1:04] Everything was great. Higher priced home, right? So you go to a much further extent when you do home inspections. Okay. It it's just natural, right? If you're buying a $300,000 condo, you know, you might not get mold testing done, especially here in Colorado. Like I've never had a house test positive. Knock on wood. Uh for a house, right? But you get a sewer scope done. This one happened to have a septic system. So we get the septic system checked out. Uh we get a water analysis test run because it's on a well here. Want to check their filter, stuff like that. We had the mold test done. Uh we have a roof inspection done, a general home inspection done.
Types of Home Inspections
[1:48] and the home inspector recommends something that I've never had done before, a stucco inspection. Right? So, I've never done a Stuckco inspection, right? Part of you wants to feel like, you know, you know what a Stuckco inspection is. Uh listing agent's been in the business for 40 years. Um he's only had a couple Stuckco inspections done. So, we're both floundering a little bit. So, I call their recommendation. Now, these inspections, first of all, took about 3 weeks to get handled, and that is a super long time for inspections. Uh, you know, you're dealing with multiple different inspectors, so you got to deal with schedules. And I'm used to inspections getting done within a few days, right?
[2:31] Sewer, radon, general home inspection. Great. That covers 99% of your bases. Um, not for this property. So, home inspector suggests we get a Stuckco inspection done. We call the Stuckco inspection company. They're scheduled a few days out. $1,200, first of all, just for the Stuckco inspection. So, we're probably at $4,000 just for inspections on this property. Uh definitely on the Yeah. highest end that I've ever been a part of. And I've dealt with some high price properties before, but this one just kind of checked all the boxes that we needed to have covered. All right. So, there's the stage. What could possibly go wrong?
[3:13] General home inspection goes great. Water analysis goes fine. Radon test goes great. No mold. Uh, no issues there. Awesome. Air quality test came back. Water flow rate came back good. Stuckco inspection. All right. First of all, this thing was like 26 pages long. We get it back and there's several pages with like red boxes and stuff. There's like little minor cracks around windows and, you know, some there's a couple of small bubbled areas. Uh, you know, we're talking like a few inches. It's like a 5,000t house. Okay. There's going to be some stuff going on with this 20-ish year old stucco. So, I decide, all right, let me call the inspector and just get his take on what he thinks about the Stuckco overall. Well, I call them up and it's always funny. You pay someone for their professional advice and you call them up and then you feel like you're like putting them out, right? You feel like you're crossing a line. You feel like, I don't know, something just doesn't feel right about it. So, I'm talking to this guy and it becomes very apparent that like he's got a lot of issues with this property. And I asked him point blank like, "Hey, if you had to rate this property on 1 to 10, like, you know, how would you rate it?" And he was like, "Oh man, you need a ton of work done. Like, 90% of the Stuckco needs to be removed and it needs to be replaced." Like, what? Okay, so we're talking. Wait, I thought maybe a few thousand dollars worth of issues. He's like, "Oh, no.
Stucco Inspection Discovery
[4:53] We're well into the six figures." Okay, so I'm talking to this guy and you're just having a conversation. So, you may not be processing all the information appropriately, right? And I wasn't. So, totally freaked me out. I'm like, "Ah, [ __ ] Deal's going to blow up." Like, there it is. Done. Um, I get off the phone with him and I start thinking about it. I'm like, "All right, 5,000T house. There's not 5,000 ft of stucco. How much is stuckco to replace?" Like to do siding on a house down here in Denver, 15, 20 grand, 25 for most of the houses we work with. And so I'm like, 100 grand sounds awfully pricey. So I start making some phone calls and sure enough, like, yeah, dude, to replace all the stuff on that one level house, uh, 50 maybe. All right. So now we have conflicting information.
[5:47] The inspector is supposed to be a professional. Okay. Now we have information that says maybe he doesn't know exactly what he's talking about, but we have this $1,200 report that the buyer has that says Stuckco has so many issues. So what do you do as a homeowner to figure this situation out? Often times what happens in a transaction is you have two contractors that conflict. you have a home inspection done and let's say you got a crack in the sewer line, something like that. Well, it's a seller's home, so the seller's potentially responsible for fixing the problem if you call it out. And maybe they hire a contractor to check it out and the contractor says, "No, there's nothing wrong with it." Maybe the buyer hires a contractor to get a bid and the, you know, buyer's contractor says, "God, the whole thing needs to be replaced." That's usually where a conflict happened. This one was a little bit different because it was between inspector to what turns out to be contractors. So, talking with the buyer, this buyer is awesome, level-headed, uh, you know, has done quite a few transactions in his life and so we're just talking through it. All right, let's just go have a few contractors go out there and give us their opinion, right? Um, so one contractor, we get to finally go out there and he's like, "I can't even give you a bid to do repairs on this because there's nothing wrong with it." Okay, 100,000 to zero. That's our conflict.
Contractor Disagreement
[7:20] Then we finally talked to the original home inspector and we're like, "Hey buddy, you're probably the only neutral third party here. What's your take on this?" And he gives us his feeling. and he says, "Hey, likely there's a few things that you can do, but honestly, yikes, there's not a whole lot to do." We then have another contractor go out there, very trusted person. Okay, that's probably the best thing I can say you can do is, you know, we had a licensed general contractor that we have history with, that we have experience with, that we went had we had go out to the property and go, "Hey buddy, like here's the report. what's the bid to do the work according to this report? And he comes back and he kind of says the first thing is the first contractor that went out and was like, man, this is really a stretch. You could do a few things, but honestly, man, if it were my house, I wouldn't do squat. So, how do you resolve this? On one hand, as the buyer, you want to ask the seller to make things right, but then on another hand, you're like, "Dude, ain't no one going to do 100 grand of Stuckco work when you got multiple people saying there's nothing wrong." So, what you have to do in this scenario is you kind of have to, I don't know, look at the angle of which your information is coming from. Okay? And this threw me off a little bit because this home inspector really would have had no dog in the fight that we were aware of unless they had agreements with other contractors that they referred work to because he was very quick to refer several contractors to do the repair work. Uh, so we went and had our people that came from a trusted source go check out the house. And their dog in the fight would have been, you know, I get this job and I get a job, right? I maybe make, let's say it's a $25,000 job at the end of the day or $50,000 job. I'm going to make 5 to 10 grand as a contractor by doing this job. So they do have a dog in the fight. yet they're saying no, I wouldn't do anything. So, what ended up happening at the end of the day? Well, we ended up taking the contractor's words for it, honestly, even though we had this inspection report from a Stuckco inspection company. Something just didn't feel right about it, and we had to trust our gut. Going back to that point in the beginning, you got to trust your gut. This Stuckco has been there for 20 years or so, showing very mild uh wear and tear. Nothing that was out of the ordinary, especially for a mountain property. So, moral of the story, right, is when buying a house, you're going to get lots of conflicting information. You just have to gather as much information as you can and you have to try to make an educated decision based on that.
Resolution and Expert Opinion
Trusting Your Gut
[10:23] Sometimes there is no right
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a stucco inspection and when do you need one?
A stucco inspection is a specialized assessment of exterior stucco for cracks, moisture intrusion, and bonding issues. It's typically recommended on homes with significant stucco surface area, older stucco systems (15+ years), or visible damage. Most Denver buyers won't need one, but mountain homes and luxury properties often warrant it.
How much do home inspections cost in Denver?
A standard general home inspection in Denver runs $400 to $600. Add-ons like radon ($150), sewer scope ($150 to $250), and mold testing ($300 to $500) increase the total. On luxury or mountain homes with septic, well, and stucco testing, total inspection costs can reach $3,000 to $4,000.
Do I need mold testing in Colorado?
Probably not. Colorado's dry climate makes mold issues rare compared to humid states. In 15 years and around 1,000 transactions, I've never had a Colorado home test positive for significant mold. It's optional insurance, but most buyers can skip it unless there's visible water damage or musty smells.
How long do home inspections take to complete?
A standard general inspection takes 3 to 5 business days from order to report. But when you stack specialized inspections like stucco, septic, well, and air quality, scheduling multiple companies can stretch the timeline to 2 or 3 weeks. Build inspection objection deadlines accordingly in your contract.
Should I trust the home inspector's contractor referrals?
Be cautious. Some inspectors have formal or informal referral relationships with repair contractors, which can create incentives to flag more issues. Always get at least one independent bid from a contractor with no connection to the inspector before agreeing to major repair work or walking from a deal.
What happens when contractors disagree during inspection objection?
When seller and buyer contractors conflict, the typical solution is bringing in a neutral third party or the original inspector for a tiebreaker opinion. You can also negotiate a price reduction or credit instead of repairs, which lets the buyer choose their own contractor after closing. Multiple bids usually clarify the truth.
Can I back out of a home purchase after inspection in Colorado?
Yes, if you're within your inspection objection deadline (typically 7 to 14 days from contract acceptance). You can terminate the contract for any inspection-related reason and recover your earnest money. After the objection deadline passes, your termination rights become much more limited, so act quickly.
Thinking about buying or selling in Denver?
Call or text (303) 552-4804 for a no-pressure conversation about your situation.
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