Environmental Concerns in Real Estate: Navigating Risks During Home Purchase
Environmental Concerns in Real Estate often catch homebuyers off guard, adding unforeseen costs to what should be an exciting investment. If you’re like most folks, buying a home requires every financial resource you can muster. For many households, the family home is the cornerstone of their financial plan to build wealth over time. The last thing a Buyer needs is to find out that the property being purchased has environmental concerns requiring expensive remediation.
Understanding Environmental Concerns
Zoning changes that allow for residential development on what used to be agricultural, commercial, or industrial land open up large tracks of land for new home development. If you’re considering buying a home on re-zoned land, you’ll want to be especially vigilant during the due diligence period of your transaction.
Re-zoning a parcel to residential does not mean that the parcel’s fit to be built on, or that it’s fit for human habitation. If a parcel’s been re-zoned recently, unintended consequences like unstable soil or buried industrial contaminants are concerns. Use the due diligence period of the purchase and sale contract to rule out environmental concerns.
If instead you discover environmental concerns during the due diligence period, quantify these by getting bids for the remediation work. Once you know the real cost of the environmental issue, you’ll want to either counter with an offer reducing the buy price to cover the cost of remediation or drop out of the deal altogether.
Timely Contract Solutions
For Buyers: Use TC Review to understand your legal position and identify choices for addressing environmental concerns of the parcel under the signed contract. Get answers to your questions. Identify solutions. Be prepared with legal options if adverse or unforeseen circumstances arise.
For Sellers: Use TC Review to understand your legal position and identify what choices you have under the signed contract if you suspect the environmental health of your land may become an issue. FSBO’s may need protection from off-the-shelf contracts that don’t fit the circumstances of their sale. Be prepared with legal options if adverse or unforeseen circumstances arise.
Use TC Review to anticipate and avoid larger problems of the transaction … and to sleep better at night!
This posting is not legal advice. Legal advice is based on specific facts. This information is necessarily general in nature.