Groundwater damage can trash your home equity fast
Groundwater damage from the lack of hand excavated french drains to protect the crawlspace or basement, and the resulting residential groundwater damage, can trash your equity fast.
A recent visit to a wonderful old classic home in the Tualatin Valley in Oregon showed again exactly how years of deferred groundwater removal maintenance will cost sellers big bucks in the end. Pests, dryrot and structural repairs, and lots of lost cash. Worse than blowing your cash in Las Vegas.
The home is a beautiful craftsman style home from the 1920’s-30’s and the present homeowners who just purchased the home, as a contingency of the loan, had all the floor joists replaced in the crawlspace as well as other extensive dryrot repairs because the home inspection indicated the damage as a contingency of the financing for the new buyer.
The cost to the sellers of the home was thousands of dollars. Big bucks. Likely low to mid 5 figures worth of lost equity for the sellers because they were either ignorant of the groundwater damage that was trashing their home and their equity as well, or they were just too broke or cheap to do the work ahead of time.
This is how it usually goes. The price gets dropped as a result of the condition, and the sellers still must solve the dryrot and pest problems at their cost before any bank will finance the new buyer.
As a result, the present homeowners elected to contact me after closing of escrow, and they have ordered the installation of hand excavated french drains to protect the home from sustaining the same groundwater damage again in the future.
If paying for the installation of hand excavated french drains is preventing you from doing deferred maintenance work, be prepared to cough up around 5-10 times that amount of cash when you are forced to deal with the subject when marketing your home if the groundwater problems are as extensive as in this example.
Just a word to the wise for the home drainage groundwater removal procrastinators.
The final upshot of the whole thing is that after the discount in price at market and the accelerated cost of repair that is the sellers responsibility, eventually someone will still have to pop for the hand excavated french drains to prevent the situation from happening all over again.