What if you could just look at a home and get an idea if it was a good home or one that might be, well, complicated? Dylan Chalk, author of “The Confident House Hunter,” an award-winning book with a novel way for buyers to look at homes, says you can.

Chalk, a certified home inspector, found a commonalty among the 5,000+ homes he inspected. It begins with the roofline.

“You would be hard-pressed to find a single feature or attribute of a house that can tell you more about the house in less time than the roofline,” he says. Sturdy and elegant rooflines = sturdy and elegant houses; quirky rooflines = quirky houses; sagging rooflines = a house likely to have some kind of structural problem. Always look at the roofline!