Who pays for the CL-100 when a house sells in Conway?

It is a contract question, not a legal one

Nothing in South Carolina law says a house cannot change hands without a CL-100. What creates the requirement is a lender, or a clause in the purchase contract. On a cash sale with no clause, nobody has to order one at all, though plenty of cash buyers order one anyway because it is the cheapest look under a house they will ever get.

So the first move is not to argue about who pays. It is to ask the closing attorney or the lender which form they want and when they want it. That single question settles most of the confusion, and it prevents the other common problem, which is ordering the wrong document and paying for it twice.

That single question matters just as much whether the closing happens in a downtown Conway office or somewhere out toward Garden City, since the CL-100 itself does not change with the address, only who is footing the bill. A buyer closing on a place near the Little River waterfront faces the same lender checklist as one near Forestbrook, and a seller near Murrells Inlet gets asked the same thing an inland Conway seller does: settle it in writing before the inspection, not after.

Local custom, and why it usually lands on the seller

The usual pattern around Conway and the beaches is that the seller arranges it. The logic is practical rather than legal: it is the seller's crawl space, the seller's existing termite bond if there is one, and the seller who will have to get anything found dealt with before closing. A seller who orders early also controls the timing instead of reacting to it.

It gets negotiated the other way often enough. A buyer wanting their own inspector, or a property being sold as is, can flip who orders and who pays. Whatever you agree, get it written into the contract in plain words, including who chooses the company, because a report ordered by the other side and a report ordered by yours can arrive with different notes on the same house.

Around Conway, custom usually just follows who has more to lose in the deal, and that is the seller more often than not. Real estate agents working closings out toward Aynor and the surrounding farmland, or up US-701 near Loris, tend to expect the same default, since a bank won't fund a loan on a house with active damage regardless of which side ordered the paper. Even a buyer relocating in from Longs off SC-905 usually finds the seller already has it handled before showing up to sign.

Thirty days, and the timing trap

The report is valid for thirty days. That single fact causes more scrambling at closing than the findings do. Order it too early in a long escrow and it expires before the closing table, and somebody pays for a second one. Order it too late and there is no room to deal with anything found without moving the date.

Work backwards from the closing date and aim for a window that leaves time to act on a finding without running out of validity. If the closing slips, ask straight away whether the report will still be inside its window, because that is a question your attorney would much rather have a week out than the morning of.

What the report is, and what it is not

The CL-100 is the Official South Carolina Wood Infestation Report, a two page form completed by a licensed pest control operator. It records visible evidence of wood destroying insects and decay fungi in accessible areas, and the moisture and fungi portion is limited to the part of the structure below the level of the first main floor, which in a Horry County house means the crawl space and substructure.

It is not a warranty, it is not a guarantee against future termites, and it is not a home inspection. It also cannot report on what nobody could see, so a wall void, a sealed area or a crawl space nobody could physically enter comes back as inaccessible rather than as clear. If you read one line on the form, read that one.

• Not a guarantee against future infestation or damage
• Not a substitute for a home inspection
• Not valid beyond thirty days
• Not a report on areas nobody could get into
• Not something a home inspector can issue, it takes a licensed pest control operator