Sadly waiving your right to an inspection is the common practice these days. You should talk to your real estate agent more about that. I imagine it's written that way in the offer because they are required to recommend it or something like that. A few years ago everyone got an inspection as part of the buying process, but demand has been so high that it's often dropped as buyers try to make competitive bids.
There are a couple of ways to approach that. You can get an inspection but waive your right to ask for any sort of remedy if there are problems that come up on the inspection (there always are, and often they are minor repairs). If you do it this way you'll have a chance to see if there are any major problems, like foundation issues that would be very expensive to repair. You'll still have the opportunity to back out at this point, though you may lose your earnest payment if you do so. We ended up asking for an inspection but had to waive the remedy rights, as our realtor said about the market in Denver "we have to beg them to take our gold plated money".
You can also ask for an inspection and your realtor will update the offer. With the market cooling down and you looking in an area where houses sell in the ~10-day range, this might be a reasonable strategy. Just bear in mind that if someone else comes in with the same offer but has waived their inspection right, the seller will likely go with them. So it depends on how quickly you're trying to get in a house, how much you want this house in particular, and how competitive you expect the other offers will be.
Your realtor should have gone over these options with you and explained the implications. If they haven't or are unwilling to do so, you may want to consider getting a different agent.
Originally Posted by: earthquake