Home Inspection in Plano, Texas

Stonebriar Property Inspections has been inspecting houses in Plano and across Collin County for more than twenty years. Every inspection is performed personally by Keith Boggs, a licensed Texas Professional Real Estate Inspector, TREC #9867, and delivered on the report form the state requires, usually the same evening.

What follows is not a list of services. It is what two decades of inspecting this specific city has taught us about what Plano houses actually do — because a Plano inspection is not a generic inspection performed inside the Plano city limits.

Plano is a resale city, and its houses share a birthday

Half of Plano was built in twenty years. The median Plano house was completed in 1993; roughly 28 per cent of the city’s housing stock went up in the 1990s and another 22 per cent in the 1980s. Barely one house in seventy predates 1960.

The city is also, for practical purposes, finished. In 2022 Plano permitted 49 new detached single-family homes against a standing stock of more than 70,000. Almost every house changing hands here is a resale, and almost every resale is thirty to forty-five years old.

That matters because a house’s construction date predicts most of what an inspection finds in it. Materials and practices that were standard, code-compliant and entirely legal when a house was built have since been abandoned — and in Plano, a very large share of the housing stock was built during the two decades that produced the most consequential of them.

Housing stock figures are from US Census American Community Survey five-year estimates and the City of Plano’s own planning reports. Era characteristics are what we observe in the field, not a prediction about any particular address.

The ground under Plano moves, and that is not the same as damage

Plano sits on the Blackland Prairie. The dominant soils here — the Houston Black, Heiden and Ferris series — are smectitic Vertisols, clays that swell when wet and shrink when dry, developed over the Ozan Formation marl beneath. In a normal year those soils crack open at depth and stay cracked for ninety to a hundred and fifty cumulative days.

Anything built on that ground moves. That is the ground, not a defect.

The mistake almost everyone makes — buyers, agents, and a fair share of the repair industry — is treating movement and damage as the same word. They are not. A slab that has moved is not by that fact damaged, and a house with cracks is not by that fact a house with a foundation problem. The questions that matter are whether the movement has produced distress that impairs the structure, and whether it is still progressing.

An inspector is paid to assess a house, not to repair it. Whether your slab needs piers does not change what we earn, which is precisely why you should want that opinion from an inspector rather than from the company quoting the piers. Where a finding genuinely warrants a licensed structural engineer, we will say so plainly. Where it does not, we will say that too — and on a Plano house of this age, it very often does not.

One local exception is worth knowing: not all of Collin County sits on high shrink-swell clay. The Austin series, derived from chalk rather than marl, behaves quite differently. Soil varies street to street here, which is one more reason a generic answer about “North Texas foundations” is worth very little.

Roofs in Plano are ended by storms, not by age

In most of the country a composition roof is replaced when it wears out. In Collin County it is usually replaced after a hail event, often years before oxidation would have finished it.

The National Centers for Environmental Information record 538 hail reports in Collin County between 1996 and 2026. Sixty-five of them describe stones of two inches or more, eight describe three inches or more, and three describe four inches or more. The largest on record for the county is 5.25 inches, on 11 April 2016, with a 4.5-inch report
on 24 March 2019.

The practical consequence is that roof age tells you much less here than it does elsewhere. A six-year-old Plano roof may be a full replacement after a storm, a partial repair, or an insurance job done badly and quickly during a period when every roofer in the county was busy. What we look at is the covering, the flashings and penetrations, the decking where it is visible, the evidence of previous repair, and whether the installation matches what the permit record and the seller’s disclosure imply.

A note on those report counts: they are reports, not storms. Reporting density has risen sharply since 2010, so raw counts should not be read as a trend in hail frequency.

What a Plano home inspection covers

Every licensed inspector in Texas works to the same published Standards of Practice and delivers findings on the same state-prescribed form, REI 7-6. That is worth understanding, because it means a cheaper inspection is not a different report — it is the same report produced in less time.

Within that scope we examine, visually and without dismantling:

• Structural systems — foundation, grading and drainage, framing where accessible, roof structure and decking, walls, ceilings, floors, doors, windows, attached porches and decks.
• Electrical — service entrance and panel, branch circuits, connected devices and fixtures, and the panel brands and wiring types that matter in houses of Plano’s age.
• Heating, ventilation and air conditioning — equipment, distribution, condensate handling and ductwork in unconditioned attics, which in North Texas is where a great deal goes wrong.
• Plumbing — supply and drain systems, water heating equipment, fixtures, and the supply material, which on a house built between roughly 1978 and 1995 is a specific question rather than a general one.
• Appliances — the built-in equipment the standards require us to operate.
• Optional systems — irrigation, pools and spas, outbuildings, and other items where present.

The Standards of Practice also define what an inspection is not. It is a visual, non-invasive assessment of condition on one day. It is not a code-compliance inspection, not a warranty, not an insurance policy, and not a prediction. Anything concealed, buried, latent or inaccessible is outside it. We will tell you what we could not see and why, because that is often as useful as what we could.

Specialist inspections available alongside

Some things fall outside a standard inspection and are ordered separately. On Plano houses the ones that most often earn their keep are:

• Wood-destroying insect report. Issued on the Texas Official Wood Destroying Insect Report, form SPCS/T-5. This requires a license from the Texas Department of Agriculture, which is a separate credential from the TREC inspector license — a point worth confirming with any inspector who offers it.
• Sewer scope. A camera survey of the drain line to the main. On a Plano house with cast iron waste piping, or on any house where mature trees sit over the line, this is the single most valuable add-on available, because the failure it finds is expensive and completely invisible otherwise.
• ZIP Level foundation measurement. A relative elevation survey of the slab, which turns a subjective impression of movement into numbers you can act on and, just as usefully, re-measure later.
• Thermal imaging. Infrared survey for moisture, missing insulation and certain electrical faults.
• Irrigation and backflow. Zone-by-zone operation and the backflow assembly.
• Pool and spa equipment. Where the property has one.

New construction and the eleven-month warranty inspection

New detached construction is now a small share of Plano, but where it exists — and in the newer developments at the city’s northern and western edges — two inspections matter.

A phase inspection before drywall closes the walls is the only opportunity anyone will ever have to see the framing, the rough plumbing and the rough electrical of a new house. That window does not reopen.

An eleven-month warranty inspection is timed deliberately. Most builder workmanship warranties run twelve months, and the callback has to be filed before it expires. A buyer who is right but late is in the same position as a buyer who is wrong.

Timing: the option period is the whole constraint

In a Texas residential contract the buyer’s right to terminate for any reason sits in Paragraph 5.B — it moved there from Paragraph 23, and a good deal of published guidance has not caught up. It is a negotiated, paid period, typically measured in days, and everything you want to know about the house has to fit inside it: the inspection, any specialist opinion the inspection triggers, and your own reading of what it all means.

That is why we schedule quickly and report the same evening wherever possible, and why we would rather you called before you needed us than after the clock started.

Where we inspect in Plano

All of Plano, including ZIP codes 75023, 75024, 75025, 75026, 75074, 75075, 75086, 75093 and 75094 — from the older neighbourhoods around downtown and east Plano, through the 1980s and 1990s subdivisions that make up the bulk of the city, to west Plano, Willow Bend and the Legacy corridor. A small part of Plano lies in Denton County; we inspect there too.

We also serve the surrounding Collin County cities, including Frisco, Allen, McKinney, Murphy, Wylie, Richardson, Prosper and Celina.

Schedule a Plano home inspection

Call (214) 923-7304 or schedule online. If you need a quote, or you are not sure which specialist inspections a particular house calls for, call first — that conversation is free and it is usually a short one.

Common questions about Plano home inspections

How long does a home inspection take in Plano?

It depends on the size, age and condition of the house, and on how much of it is accessible. A typical Plano resale of 2,500 to 3,500 square feet takes several hours on site. A house with a pool, outbuildings, a pier-and-beam section or a long list of previous repairs takes longer. Anyone quoting you a fixed, short duration before seeing the property is quoting a schedule rather than an inspection.

Should I attend the inspection?

Yes, if you can. A report describes findings; standing in the attic while someone explains what they are looking at teaches you the house. If you cannot attend the whole inspection, come for the last part, when the findings can be walked through in place.

Does a Plano home inspection check whether work was permitted?

No. A Texas inspection is an assessment of condition, and the Standards of Practice expressly do not require an inspector to determine compliance with any code. Permit history is a separate enquiry, made through the City of Plano’s own records. What an inspection can tell you is whether work appears to have been done to a workmanlike standard, which is a different question and often the more useful one.

Do you inspect houses in Plano that are still under construction?

Yes — phase inspections during construction and final inspections at completion, as well as eleven-month warranty inspections before the builder’s first-year workmanship coverage expires.

My Plano house was built in 1991. What should I be most concerned about?

Statistically, three things: the supply plumbing material, because polybutylene was in widespread use until around 1995; the slab, because post-tension foundations of that era are on soils that move seasonally; and the roof, because it has almost certainly been replaced at least once after a hail event and the quality of that work varies enormously. None of those is a reason not to buy a house. All three are reasons to have it looked at properly.

Is the inspection fee the same as the option fee?

No, and the two are confused constantly. The option fee is paid to the seller for the contractual right to terminate during the option period. The inspection fee is paid to the inspector for the inspection. They are separate payments to separate parties for entirely different things.

Stonebriar Property Inspections — Keith Boggs, Texas Professional Real Estate Inspector, TREC #9867.
TREC Consumer Protection Notice · Information About Brokerage Services not applicable to inspectors.