by Robert O'Brien

Created on: April 12, 2011

Your realtor has worked tirelessly with you to help you find suitable listings and your stack of property listings is now down to a manageable few finalists. You’ve researched schools, parks and recreational facilities, studied commuting routes, evaluated the neighborhoods, and thought about how your housing needs will change over the course of time. You feel confident in your ability to select worthy candidates based on your personal criteria and whether or not the community suits your lifestyle. These are all aspects of the house-hunting process that you feel intrinsically able to handle on your own, but what about the house itself? There may be aspects about it that might make a particular property an unwise investment and tip the scales towards one house over another.

Unless you have unlimited means and can afford to hire a professional home inspector to  review each of the finalists under consideration, you'll want to take heed of the following so you can you can winnow down your property choices. Every house you evaluate, old or new, will have some issues that will be cause for you to spend money, often sooner rather than later. The potential cost of these repairs may help you eliminate a candidate or two.

The Site

Let’s begin with the site. It's the property upon which your prospective house is built. Unless you live in a desert climate, the chief element working against the longevity of the house is water. Water, in the form of runoff from rain or melting snow and ice, is directed from the roof to gutters and downspouts and discharged in some fashion. Often times, it is discharged in a way that does more harm than good. Contributing to this is water from surface runoff that flows across the ground and around the house, as determined by the topography of the land. Take a walk around the house and pay close attention to what you see. The grade all around the perimeter should slope away from the foundation. Even if the house is situated on a sloped lot, for at least the first several feet, the grade should pitch away from the structure. In the case of a steeply sloping site, there should be swales around the house to direct runoff around and away from the structure and down grade. Grades that slope towards the house without being diverted in any way will cause moisture-related maintenance problems.

Similarly, eaves and downspouts that discharge onto flat areas adjacent to the house tend to pond surface water, which is another common

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