When you’re looking at houses, it can be easy to look for the obvious. Does it have a big yard? Check. Master suite? Check. Upgraded kitchen? Check. But it’s the not-so-obvious things that can have the biggest impact or reveal the biggest red flags. As such, I’ve come up with seven ways of assessing a house that aren’t especially obvious but that could have a big impact on your decision.
1. Compare the neighborhood cars. I don’t want to encourage putting a divide between the poor and wealthy, but the reality is that most of us want to be in a neighborhood where our financial situation and stage of life is roughly similar to those around us. There are plenty of exceptions, but joining a neighborhood where the average neighbor is in a dramatically different life stage or income bracket than you can impact your ability to get along with them, lower your home value, and make simple things miserable.
So what’s a quick way to get a feel for the neighborhood? Look at the cars. Do most of the neighbors have new, European cars? Older Japanese vehicles? Pickup trucks? Minivans? You can get a lot of information by just looking at the cars that are out there and then comparing them to your own.
2. Listen. When people think about noise being a big part of their home purchase, often they’re thinking about the noise from traffic, but there is a whole lot of other noise you should be thinking about. Is the dog next door loud and aggressive-sounding? That’s probably not something you want to listen to all the time, and good luck trying to sell the home while that dog is still there. Are people around the neighborhood always yelling or blaring music? For most people those would also be bad signs. Hear lawn mowers running? Maybe that’s an indication that the people in the neighborhood care for and keep up with their property. Keep your ears alert and you might find something insightful about the neighborhood.
3. Look up. The majority of people who walk into a home would freak out about a small hole in a bedroom wall but wouldn’t even notice a water stain on the ceiling. But a hole in the wall is easy to patch in contrast to a ceiling stain, which will likely be difficult to cover up and match to the rest of the ceiling, not to mention may be indicative of a leak somewhere above the ceiling (in the roof or second floor).
I always tell my clients to look up. Take note of what’s going on in the ceiling. You can have an inspector look at every inch of the roof, but he’s not going to be able to tell you as much as that ceiling can.
4. Look down. Concerned about termites? I recommend to all my clients to get a CL100 (commonly called a “termite letter”) done, but there’s another way to assess things before it gets to that point. Look down – literally. If the home is on a slab, you can look down at the spot where the slab meets another slab, such as at the patio or at the garage. Where the two slabs meet is one of the most likely places to find termites, since they like to live in the ground between the slabs.
If on a crawl space, look down into the crawl space and see if you find grooves in the joists or any mud tunnels anywhere. Termites leave obvious traces behind them, and you can usually find them by just doing a little looking.
5. Beware of add-ons. I don’t avoid homes with add-ons, but I am wary of them. Add-ons have a high likelihood of having issues because a) contractors can get away with doing a shoddy job on an add-on more so than if they’re building an entire house and b) because often people adding on to a home are trying to do it as cheaply as possible and will try to cut corners in some way. The result can be structural issues, roofing issues, plumbing issues, duct work issues, etc. (I’ve seen all of the above.) Again, you don’t need to completely avoid homes that have add-ons, but have extra caution when considering them.
6. Open the windows. Windows, especially older ones, are finicky things. They can lose their seal, get broken locks, or be painted shut, just to mention a few of the possibilities. If you’re looking at a home, you should open at least some of the windows to make sure everything is working property, and if it’s an older home, you should probably try to open them all. The vast majority of homes that weren’t recently built have window problems, and the vast majority of homes with old windows have at least some of the windows painted shut. Most home inspectors aren’t going to open every single window, so take a few minutes to go through and do it yourself.
7. Drive by at different times. I have some friends that bought a home years ago that was separated from a night club by only the tree line in their backyard. Guess what happened every night after they bought the home? If you guessed that they were kept awake by loud music from the night club, you win the prize!
On a serious note, do yourself a favor and do multiple drive-bys of a home that you’re interested in, and do them at different times of different days. You never know how a neighborhood will transform (for good or for bad) at night or on weekends.
The sound issues can definitely be a nuisance. The house I recently purchased is on the exact rout to GSP for incoming planes. The planes don’t always fly in the same way so we didn’t realize this for a week or so.