After the deluge
Dana Hollish Hill, a fellow buyer’s agent from NAEBA, wrote this as her FaceBook status this week:
How I love seeing homes after a huge rain.
There is a lot to be learned about a house if you see it just after bad weather has rolled through. Here are some things that I look for. What would you add to the list? Some of these may turn out to be easily fixed. However, you would not get the same warning if you saw the same house during a dry spell.
Bad signs:
If you see a wet vac (shop vac) plugged in and looking recently used it could be a bad sign. Did the owners need to vacuum up water during or after the storm? This is a red flag that needs to be investigated.
Damp marks on the exterior walls or floor show that water was able to get in during the extraordinary conditions.
A damp smell or seeing damp wood still in basement is a bad sign. Owners need to be careful to dry out any wood that got wet to avoid mold. Anything that is porous that got wet should have been thrown out by now.
Buckling vinyl or wood parquet floor tiles can happen over a long period of time or can happen suddenly from standing water. Either way, dampness is getting in.
Maybe bad signs:
A sump pump that is still pumping a week after a storm is a good sign and a bad one. It is a good sign, if the basement is dry. However, if it still pumping, then the water table is high, or the pump is set too low, or both. This is a red flag that needs to be investigated.
I saw two houses that were very close together. Neither had good water control and it showed. That told me this development may be in a low area. I will look into it if I have clients seriously interested in a house there.
I saw a house with a concrete foundation (usually a hard foundation for water to get into) that had two sump pumps, two dehumidifiers, and a perimeter drain system. It also had white efflorescent marks along the bottom of the walls. It smelled wet, even though there was almost nothing in it. Some part of that system is not working. It could be a big problem, or it could be something as simple as having the dehumidifiers set too high, too low, or shut off for some time. (Too high is a problem? Yes, dehumidifiers can suck moisture out of the concrete and into the basement, causing efflorescence.)
Outside of houses, there are things to notice on the streets:
I saw rubble on a small street. When I looked more closely, I saw the rock a debris was in front of a storm drain. Chances are, that drain was full and made a puddle in front of it during the storm. This one was rather large – going across the whole street and in front of three houses.
Did you notice the freshly cut tree stumps? Everyone likes neighborhoods with trees, except when they come down in a storm. I heard two first-hand accounts of trees coming down. One took out the electricity and caught fire. One caused no real harm on the way down.
Do you love seeing houses after a huge rain? What else did you notice?
