Lehigh Valley Homes with Structural Problems

You've looked at numerous Lehigh Valley Homes and finally find the "Perfect" one. You and your agent get together and fill out the agreement of sale and submit it to the home seller. They accept!!

Now, the next step is to get a Property Inspection done on the property. Although the house looks nice, what possible repair work is needed.

One of the worst situations that can occur is that structural problems are found in the house. A roof or furnace has known solutions and although they can be expensive to repair or replace they can be easily dealt with. 

Structural problems typically involve getting an evaulation from a structural engineer and then finding a company competent to fix the problem.  

Some common concerns are:

Will the repair totally fix the problem or will it come back and costs thousands of dollars in the future?

Will the resale value of the home be affected?

A few problems that I have encountered recently with home buyers:

A home in Wind Gap had two basement walls that were buckling. The Lehigh Valley Home Buyer was going to skip the property inspections because the house had been totally renovated. I convinced the buyer to get the inspections and sure enough two of the basement walls were pushing in. If the buyer had skipped the inspections, their new home might have fallen down a year later. As a result of the findings, the seller gave the buyer money to reconstruct the walls.

A home in Allentown had a corner of the attached garage that had sunken a few inches. A review of the basement showed stairway cracking in the cinder block wall that was shared with the garage. Parking their car in the garage may have caused the basement wall to fail.

A home in Nazareth had a roofing structure that was questioned. Could a heavy snow cause the roof to cave in? A $600.00 repair ensured that the roof was capable of handling the load.

A home in Lehigh Township was inspected and the lack of some structural posts in the basement was questioned. The buyers walked away from the house.

I showed a home in Lower Milford last year that was built on a quarry. You walked into the house and everything seemed fine. Then when you went into the back part of the house you felt like you were at a carnival in the Fun House with the sloping floor. The estimate to stop the problem was approximately $30,000. That didn't include how much it would cost to jack the back part of the house back up so that the floors weren't sloping and the doors and framing all lined up again. 

The problem, from a home buyer point of view, is that it can get expensive to determine what exactly is wrong with the house, will the solution be a long term fix, and will the problem re-occur or cause a problem if the house needs to be sold.

A Lehigh Valley Home Buyer needs to be aware that any home for sale, even if being sold as-is, should still have the property inspection done. Do you know what you are buying?