Termite Inspection: What a Real One Covers, and What the Report Means

What Does a Real Termite Inspection Look Like?

A real termite inspection is not a walk around the living room with a flashlight and a clipboard. It's physical work, it covers the whole structure, and it takes as long as your house takes. It's done by a licensed inspector start to finish — nobody in a polo shirt with three weeks of training, no commissioned closer following behind. Here's the route I take through a typical San Gabriel Valley home.

Starting outside

I walk the full perimeter first: eaves, fascia boards, and rafter tails — the number-one drywood termite target on the Craftsman-era and stucco homes around Arcadia, Pasadena, and Monrovia — plus the foundation line, where subterranean termites build their mud tubes up from the soil. Fences, patio covers, and decks get checked wherever they touch the house or put wood in contact with the ground, because those contact points are how a yard problem becomes a house problem.

The garage

Garages are honest — the framing is usually exposed, so damage that hides behind drywall in the house shows itself here. I check the framing, the slab edges where mud tubes like to climb, and anywhere stored lumber or cardboard sits against the walls.

Inside the house

Window and door frames, the sills where pellets and shed wings collect, baseboards, and the plumbing penetrations where pipes pass through wood. Those penetrations matter twice over: they're a hidden path from the subarea into the walls, and any slow leak around them creates the moisture conditions subterranean termites and wood-decay fungi both love. Moisture is part of a WDO inspection, not a separate subject.

The attic

Wherever there's access, I go in. Drywood termites in the SGV love rafters, ridge boards, and the top plates you'll never see from below, and their pellets sift down onto the insulation, where they're easy to trace once you're actually up there.

The subarea

The crawl space under a raised-foundation home is where subterranean termites do their work — mud tubes up the piers and into the floor framing. Down there I'm also reading moisture, ventilation, and any spot where earth meets wood.

And through all of it, I don't just look. I sound wood — tapping to hear the hollow note of eaten galleries under an intact painted surface. I probe suspect members to find damage the eye can't. I trace pellet piles back to the kickout holes they fell from, because the pile tells you a colony exists but the hole tells you where it lives. And I read the difference between drywood sign and subterranean sign, because the two termites take completely different treatments.

One honest word about the word accessible. No inspector can see inside a wall or under a tiled shower floor. Where an area is sealed, furniture-blocked, or physically too tight to enter, I note it as inaccessible on the report rather than guessing about it. An inspector who claims to have cleared areas he never entered isn't being thorough; he's being fictional. California's rules boil down to a fair standard: report what you saw, disclose what you couldn't.

What Is a WDO Report?

WDO stands for wood-destroying organism, and a WDO inspection report is the formal California document that comes out of an inspection like the one above — you'll also hear it called a termite report or, in full, a wood destroying pest and organism inspection report. It's filed under the state's structural pest control rules, and it's the document buyers, sellers, agents, and lenders actually rely on — not a verbal "looks fine to me."

The report contains three things: findings (what I found and where, in plain language), a diagram of the structure with each finding keyed to its location, and recommendations (what should be done about each item).

Every finding lands in one of two buckets, and the industry terms are worth knowing because you'll see them on any report you're handed:

Section 1 items are active infestations and the damage they've caused — live drywood or subterranean termite activity, fungus and dry rot, existing damage. These are the "it's happening now" items, and they're what a lender or buyer typically wants resolved.

Section 2 items are conditions likely to lead to an infestation — earth-to-wood contact, a plumbing leak keeping a sill plate damp, missing subarea ventilation. Nothing is eating your house yet, but the table is set. Fixing Section 2 items is how you avoid future Section 1 items.

A report that lumps everything together, or inflates Section 2 conditions into Section 1 urgency, is doing you a disservice. Mine keeps the line where the state draws it.

Buying or Selling a Home? Here's How the Termite Report and Clearance Work

If you're in the middle of a sale — either side of it — the termite report usually isn't optional. Lenders commonly require a current WDO report before funding, and buyers reasonably want to know what they're getting. What you're actually being asked to produce is two documents: the report (the findings) and, once any Section 1 items are completed, a clearance — the certification that the active-infestation items on the report have been taken care of. When your agent says "we need termite clearance," that's the piece of paper they mean, and that clearance is frequently what the lender and the transaction are actually waiting on.

Here's how I handle it. I inspect, I write the report, and because ExterMetro is also a licensed treatment company, I can perform the Section 1 work and issue the clearance — one call, one timeline, which matters when the transaction has a closing date bearing down on it. If timing is tight on your sale, say so when you call — report turnaround and completion certifications can usually be worked to your deadline.

And here's the part I want in writing on my own website: you are free to use any company you want for the treatment or repairs. The report is yours; take it to anyone. I have no interest in inflating findings to sell work — my report tells you what actually needs doing and, just as deliberately, what doesn't. Plenty of my reports come back clean, and plenty list Section 2 conditions I recommend watching rather than paying anyone to chase. That's the same no-tent-first-sales-tactics policy that runs through everything else I do — my license number is on every report, and my business here runs on referrals, not one-time strangers.

How Often Should You Get a Termite Inspection?

Right now, if you're seeing sign. Pellet piles that look like coarse sand or ground pepper. Mud tubes on the foundation or piers. Winged swarmers indoors, or piles of identical shed wings on the sills. Wood that sounds hollow when you knock it, paint that blisters and ripples, sagging eaves. Any one of these is worth a call today — termite problems only get more expensive with time. Not sure what you're looking at? My termite guide shows what each sign looks like.

Every couple of years, even without sign, if you own older SGV housing stock — and around Arcadia, Pasadena, and Monrovia, most of us do. The Craftsman-era and mid-century homes here have decades of exposed rafter tails, original eaves, and raised foundations, and this valley carries real pressure from both drywood and subterranean termites at once. Colonies grow quietly for years before they show. An inspection every two or three years catches new activity while it's still one board instead of one roofline.

Every year, if you're on my annual program — and this is the option I push hardest, because it's the best value I offer. After a localized treatment, the two-year warranty can be extended year by year through an annual inspection and treatment program: I come back each year, re-inspect the whole structure, treat any new activity, and the warranty keeps rolling forward. New infestations get caught at the one-rafter stage instead of the whole-eave stage. It's the closest thing to a subscription against termites that honest work allows.

What Happens After the Inspection?

You get straight answers, in one of four directions:

• Nothing found. I document it, tell you so, and tell you when to have me back — typically a couple of years out. No invented problems to justify the visit.
• Limited, accessible drywood activity. The most common finding in SGV homes, and usually the best news short of a clean report: a localized treatment handles it — foam injected directly into the infested wood, done in an afternoon, no tent, backed by the two-year warranty.
• Widespread drywood infestation. If the activity is scattered through the structure or buried where no localized tool can reach, the house genuinely needs fumigation, and I'll say exactly that and coordinate the whole process. My fumigation prep guide walks you through getting the house ready.
• Subterranean termites. Mud tubes mean a soil colony, and no tent touches those — the answer is soil treatment at the foundation, and I'll map exactly where.

If your house needs a tent, I will say so. If it needs nothing, I will say that too. Twelve years in, that sentence is still the whole business model.

What Does a Termite Inspection Cost?

If you're getting an inspection because you suspect a problem and want treatment options, my quote for the work is free — that's how it's always worked here. For a formal WDO inspection report — the filed document a sale requires — there's an inspection fee, and it's quoted up front, in writing, before I come out. No surprises at the door, no fee that mysteriously grows once I'm in your attic. Call (626) 409-1584, book online, or send me a message, and you'll have the number before you commit to anything.