Archive for October, 2009
Begin with the home’s surroundings. You’re not just buying the house, you’re also buying into a community and a neighborhood. What’s around the house can be as important as what’s inside it. Consider the street on which the home is located, as well as the other streets with the six blocks or so on all sides. Do the homes and yards appear to be well cared for? The condition of nearby properties will affect the value of the house you buy. If the houses around yours are in poor repair, you should be concerned about what’s happening in the neighborhood. Maybe it’s a down-and-out area that’s on its way back up; on the other hand, it may be heading down. Make sure you know which way the trends are moving. What kind of area is it in? Is it exclusively residential, or are there commercial uses as well? How much space is there between houses? What amenities — shopping, movies, transportation, parks, schools, churches, and so on — are close by? Are there any other developments planned for the area? If one of the things you like is the open space nearby, see if you can find out who owns the land and whether it’s likely to stay open. This is the time to discover that a developer plans to build a 200- home subdivision across the road, or that the state has selected the nice field at the foot of the hifi as the site of its new waste- treatment facility. All of these questions about the neighborhood are of concern to you not only as a prospective buyer, which you are today, but as a prospective seller, which you may be in the future. Don’t say about potential problems, “I guess we could live with them,” without also asking, “But what about other people — the ones we might want to sell to later on?” So if you’re interested in a neighborhood, find out as much as you can about it. A real-estate broker should be able to provide basic information about market trends, development plans, and the like. But count on doing some research on your own. Now’s a good time to start reading the community newspapers — the supermarket “throwaways” as well as the wider-circulation dailies and weeklies. Grab anything you can find that might give you a better idea of what it would be like to live in the area. This is how you might discover, for example, that a regional shopping center is in the works nearby or, in a less positive vein, that the local schools have lost their accreditation or that local property taxes are going to be revalued for the first time in twent’ years (which means they’re likely to jump).
Make sure your research on the neighborhood includes the other people living there. Is the area full of two-career families, leaving it practically deserted during the day? That might be a drawback to a new mother who’s going to be at home with her child. Families with children typically like to live in areas where there are other children living nearby. It’s true that you can’t really know how you’re going to like a neighborhood until you live there, but you can ask other people how they like living there. One very good question to ask some of your prospective neighbors is simply, “If you had it to do over again, would you still buy a house in this area?”