If you bought a new construction home in the last year, your builder's warranty is one of the most valuable things you own — and most homeowners let it expire without ever using it. Here's what an 11-month warranty inspection is, why it matters, and how to use it to get free repairs from your builder.
Most production builders in Michigan — Pulte, Lombardo, Toll Brothers, Robertson, MJC, and others — offer a written 1-year limited warranty on workmanship and materials, plus longer warranties (typically 2 years on systems and 10 years on structural). The 1-year warranty is the most generous: anything you can document as a defect within the first 12 months of ownership is the builder's responsibility to fix at no cost to you.
The catch: you have to identify the defects, document them in writing, and submit a formal warranty claim before the deadline. Builders are not going to call you and ask if you've noticed any problems. The clock runs out at exactly 12 months.
We schedule warranty inspections at month 10 or early month 11 of ownership. That gives you:
After hundreds of new-construction warranty inspections, the same 8–10 issues come up over and over. None of them are catastrophic, but every single one is the builder's responsibility under warranty:
Our 11-month warranty inspection runs in the same range as a buyer's inspection — typically $400–$650 depending on home size. The builder repairs we find on a typical warranty inspection have a contractor-replacement value of $2,500–$8,000+ when the homeowner has to pay for them out of pocket later. The math is straightforward.
The 1-year workmanship warranty is gone, but you may still have time on the 2-year systems warranty (HVAC, electrical, plumbing) and the 10-year structural warranty. Call us; we'll tell you what's worth pursuing and what isn't.