What an inspection misses twice was never really checked.

A home inspector spends most of a visit on what can be reached easily: every room, the doors and windows, the taps and the geyser. The parts that need a ladder, a torch or a crawl are where the time runs short. If the roof hatch has been painted shut and nobody brought a ladder, the roof space simply does not get looked at, and a report can still read as thorough. When a second inspector arrives months later under the same conditions, the same sagging trusses go unseen for the same reason. A problem that slips past two inspections is rarely bad luck. It lives in a place neither one reached.

A good report says what was inspected and also what could not be reached, whether that is the roof void, the subfloor, the wall behind a fitted cupboard or the pipes under a tiled floor. Most inspections are visual, and an honest one is clear about the limits of what the eye could see that day. So the useful reading of any report starts with what is missing. A section that is silent about the roof is different from one that says the roof was inspected and found sound. Two reports silent in the same place are pointing, without meaning to, at the spot nobody has been.