Architect's Guide for Buying a Home - Part 2

So you got your pre-approval letter from the bank and hook up with a buyer's agent that your brother in law had a good experience with. After some digging through the MLS you and him came up with a short list of property to see, scheduled the appointment and before you know it, you are standing in front of prospect house #1. Now what?

In today's post I'll start by talking about the first thing you should check when it comes to shopping for a home; the lay of the land. Now when you are purchasing a home, you are actually buying the land that it is sitting on, and the house (which is known as an improvement) just happen to come with it. You should carefully consider the positive and negative aspect of each site before you contemplate the house itself. After all, you can always make improvement to a home but it is difficult if not impossible to improve features of a site, such as a view or its location.

Location, Location and LOCATION!
The old adages still stands true, location of a site is just about the most important aspect of a home. How long does it take for you to get to work? What about public transportation or shopping areas? Take a map and draw a 5 miles radius circle around the site, this will be your circle of convenience. This is about how far you would be willing to travel if you found out that you just happen to ran out of milk in the morning. You can perform a simple online map based search to find out what exactly is located inside this circle.

Where the schools are located, and how are the schools? You don’t want to be too far but it also might get a bit noisy if you are right across the street.

Is there any high traffic road, or even highway nearby? It might both be a source of background noise as well as hazards for younger children.

A lot of personal preferences are involved with it comes to the selection of a site location, but that’s not why you are reading a guide from an Architect since you know those things already. “tell me something I don’t know!” you say? On to the show then.

Site Features:

There are both positive and negative site features, there are no perfect sites and there are always negative features to off balance the positive. But the more you know how to identify them, the better you will be able to make a accurate assessment of how good a “fit” it is for you.

Shut up and listen! No really, when you get off the car at the prospective site. Turn the car off and tell everyone to be quiet for a few minutes. Listen and see what you hear, do you hear high way 87 back behind the house, what about the sound of rushing water from the small stream at the back of your site? People often miss this as the excitement of open houses renders the noises less perceptible, but do remember that what might seem acceptable now will not when you are lying on your bed 2 in the morning trying to sleep. And don’t believe the hype with sound insulation, most residential home are not build to filter out traffic noises, for that you’ll need solid concrete walls.

This land is my land! Always request for a lot survey before the actual visit. And when you get there, walk the entire perimeter of the lot (or drive if you are rich and is buying a 100 acre) but it is important that you get a sense of where the property starts and where it ends. Are there any area where the lot delineation is not clearly marked up? Is your neighbor’s fence (or your neighbor for that matter) sitting on your lot? Do you share a driveway, and if so is there a clear agreement as to who does the maintenance and how bills are shared? Oh and last thing while you are taking your stroll, check out the views.