A new faucet
does not mean a new pipe.
Renovated bathrooms are a finish. The plumbing you are buying is the pipe behind them, the heater in the garage, and the line under the yard.
Run water while you are there. Not a polite trickle. Fill a tub, flush the lowest toilet, and start a shower. You are listening for a gurgle in another room and watching whether the tub drains while the shower runs. Open the sink cabinets. A new vanity with a stained cabinet floor is a leak that was decorated. Look at the water heater label for age, and look at the pan under it for rust that has already dried. Ask where the main shutoff is. If nobody in the sale can find it, you will be the one looking during the first leak.
The part a general inspection skips
A home inspector opens what can be opened. A sewer camera sees the lateral, which is often the expensive unknown in older Los Angeles neighborhoods: clay, roots, a belly, a patch. It is worth doing before you own the problem, especially if the house has large trees, a recent “drain cleaning” on the disclosure, or bathrooms that were remodeled without a permit you can read. The recording should come to you, not stay in someone else’s truck.
Galvanized supply pipe, a heater past its useful life, and a yard line with a break are three different negotiations. They should be priced as repairs, not absorbed as character. We can look and say which is which. We cannot make a seller honest. The picture can.
Supply pipe, pressure, and the heater
Turn on a high faucet and a shower together. A trickle at both can be a corroded galvanized system, a half-closed valve, or a failing pressure regulator. Galvanized supply pipe, common in older Los Angeles houses, closes from the inside. The outside still looks like a pipe. The inside is scale, and the first symptom is weak hot water at the far bathroom. Replacing one rusty nipple does not restore a house of it. Ask what the visible pipe is, in the garage and under the sinks, and assume the buried or wrapped pipe matches it until someone proves otherwise.
Look at the heater the way you would look at an appliance you are about to own: age on the label, rust at the base, a pan that has already held water, a flue that is loose, straps that are missing. A heater installed in a closet over a hallway is a future ceiling. A pressure regulator on the main, if there is one, should be part of the question. High pressure shortens valves, hoses, and heaters, and it is adjustable only if the regulator still works.
The lateral and the paperwork
Ask who owns the line from the house to the city main, and whether a backup has been disclosed. In much of this city that yard line is the owner’s. A camera is the only way to see it before you do. Read a disclosure that says “drain cleaning” or “roots” as a reason to televise, not as a completed repair. A new bathroom on an old lateral is a finish over an unexamined pipe.
Permits for a recent heater or a repipe are worth requesting. Work with no permit is not automatically a disaster, and permitted work is not automatically good, but the paper tells you whether the flue, the straps, and the materials were ever looked at by anyone but the seller. Walk the house once with the water running and once under the sinks. The second lap is where the listing photographs stop.
Related service: What a camera can show. For the visit itself, call 818-631-7296 or send the address.