Our first house was one a 1/2ac lot at the end (bottom -- this will become important later) of a cul-de-sac in a great semi-urban neighborhood in Cary, NC. We learned after repeated backyard flooding and near-incursion of storm water into our patio door that our street had been built on what had been the original stormwater collection pond for the larger neighborhood. The builder got permission from the city to move the pond to build our cul-de-sac, but that didn't stop our street from still being the lowest point in the neighborhood, where all surface water ran-off to, and our house was at the very lowest point.
Long story short, we ended up installing a french drain on two sides of our house, putting a drain at the end of our driveway to redirect water [from just running down our driveway to our house], having the front wall foundation rebuilt and jacked up because the footer had nearly completely eroded (1970s house), and still needed to add two 24" square drain boxes in the back yard (with buried 4" PVC draining into the creek at the back of the property) to remediate all this. It was also a tree-filled lot and the drain boxes would almost immediately clog with leaves during heavy rains, so I spent a lot of time out there in ankle to knee deep water with a rake to keep the drains clear.
This still wasn't enough! We got a so much surface run-off from our uphill neighbors that it looked like a sheet of rushing water across our backyard during heavy storms. We had a creek at the back of the property but were not allowed to mess with it because of Corps of Engineers easement regulations. At the end of the day, we finally solved our problems by getting an agreement from our neighbor to let us dig a surface water drain from the low point in their yard into the creek, and then we'd build a "temporary" (cf prior easement rules against permanent walls) berm along the property line to prevent surface water from coming into our yard at all. That "berm" was 76 bags of Qwikrete stacked three high and covered with grass clippings, yard waste & mulch. Technically we could have removed it if the city had inspected, but it was very much a cement wall.
We have never since, and never will, build or purchase a house at the bottom of a hill.
20+ years ago, I had moved into a newly built home. And the first serious rain we got, I had water come into the living room (flooded the porch and seeped under the door). There was no insurance coverage since it was "surface water" and thus excluded. So I had to use a shop-vac and rent a couple of blowers to dry it out.
There was a ditch out back but it obviously wasn't deep enough. I did the math and ended up with an astounding amount of water flowing by (something like 20,000 gallons per minute[0]) and complained to the builder about it. They sent a couple of guys out there who installed two 4" corrugated drainage pipes and said it was good enough.
When the next big rain happened, where those pipes emptied out there was a 3 foot tall fountain of water from the pressure. It was an amateur Bellagio, lol. The yard still flooded but luckily didn't come into the house again.
Since then, the landscaping came in throughout the neighborhood which controlled the runoff. But it taught me a lot of respect for getting slopes & drains right - Always use a larger pipe than you think you'll need.
[0] The formula seems to be: V = 0.408 × Q/(D^2) where V is velocity in feet-per-second, Q is the flow rate in gallons-per-minute, and D is the diameter of the pipe in inches. I estimated the diameter based on the land profile that was underwater, and timed the velocity by following twigs/leaves floating by.
You probably got a bit higher number than the true one, because water flows faster the farther it is from the floor/wall, and leaves float so they move like the fastest water, not the average water.
I checked my policy and they use the "surface water" term. So it's probably something that varies by company and perhaps region.
To get a flood policy you would have to speak to a broker about whether you qualify for the National Flood Insurance Program. They won't issue a policy to you directly.
I've visited Lloyd's Building on a building tour once, and seeing the scale and sheer floors of actuaries with PhDs in god knows what domain made me a firm believer in the real life prowess of the insurance industry. I honestly don't think consumer insurance is worthwhile, but commercial definitely if you have an equally capable team of actuaries to run the numbers and they stack up to cover the risks involved.
Sure but all these people are there to ensure the insurance will get ahead, not to help the customers.
One of my friend works in reinsurance and his favourite joke is that every time the insurance company pays a claim, someone is getting fired. Obviously a joke but it seems to paint a fairly accurate picture of how the business is run.
A lot of insurance companies have caps on profit, either as part of their structure or by regulation. Often the cap is structured as a percentage above covered losses, so administrative costs, including executive salary expense are effectively limited. In health insurance, this can lead to cost inflation, but I haven't really seen that in home and auto --- the market of service providers is so different.
Certainly, they're in business to make money, and helping customers is just part of the process, not their goal.
But --- it's in the customers' interest for the company to be accurate about accepting and denying claims. If the company accepts claims that should be denied, that means higher premiums. If the company denies claims that should have been paid, that may result in the company having to pay those claims after appeal/lawsuit and possibly with penalties; penalties get paid by the pooled insureds one way or another.
Insurance fills a need and is not just an evil company doing evil. Most insurance covers risks of loss that the insured would be unable or unwilling or at least unhappy to cover themselves. For most homeowners, if their house burns down, they would be unable to rebuild without insurance, unless there was clear liability from a person or company with big pockets.
As I understand, a lot of property and casualty insurance companies are structed as "mutuals" (not sure the exact term). And, most of the annual profit is refunded to customers. They are basically run as non-profits.
Technically true, but the people in charge are not the customers. The people in charge(C-Suite) have zero incentive to ever refund any annual profit. They have all the incentives in the world to ensure their compensation just happens to suck up any and all annual profits. Who is going to stop them?
Vanguard(the brokerage) is structured the same way pretty much, except it's the various mutual funds(like VTSAX/VTI) that own the larger corporation. So far the infection of c-suite salaries continually growing larger and larger hasn't gotten to Vanguard yet, but they are now a few CEO's removed from the original founder(Jack Bogle), so it's probably about time that shift starts to happen.
If what you say is true, why did they return any money at all? They could easily pay that to C-suite and senior execs in huge bonuses.
Also, to clarify, the correct term is "mutual insurance", which Wiki describes as:
> A mutual insurance company is an insurance company owned entirely by its policyholders. It is a form of consumers' co-operative. Any profits earned by a mutual insurance company are either retained within the company or rebated to policyholders in the form of dividend distributions or reduced future premiums.
From what I've observed, if the insurance company uses a mascot of any kind, you will have difficulties in getting them to pay a claim.
This is consumer insurance, so your typical auto, home, renter's, etc. policies. If you need commercial or E&O coverage, ask your broker to check them against the AM Best rating list.
I'm going to say that the vast majority of homeowners are not paranoid enough when it comes to buying their home. It is a huge investment and comes with very high transaction costs yet most people seem to make the decision based solely on superficial aesthetics.
What would you recommend noobs do, when buying a house? I guess hiring an expert would be the recommended approach, but all “experts” I have seen were all almost as superficial as I was - one literally assessed the wrong house. I’d pay good money for a good one, but it’s hard to find.
Find an aggressive home inspector that isn't associated with your realtor, preferably one with general contractor experience and someone who is older. Like it or not, older folks have seen more things go wrong in more ways and can spot problems that younger folks might not be familiar with.
I have certification of an inspector with various home things… Flooring, roofing, general home inspection.. no one wants to pay what it’s worth so I don’t practice that, it’s just fun for learning about the building trades
Further - if you never have a problem the value of the inspection is zero. If you do have a problem the value of an inspection after the problem has occurred is minimal. The value of an inspection that prevents a problem is something - but how to quantify that is difficult.
Depending where you live local/state/fed government will keep maps.
Topographic maps, flood risk maps, wildfire risk maps, maps of services nearby (substations, transformer locations, storm drains etc), easements, special planning/protection zones, surrounding area zoning etc.
These should all inform your decision. I've vetoed houses because they back onto nature/wildlife reserves, are too near substations, are in flood risk areas etc
I had a structural engineer come and look at a house I was thinking of buying. It cost me $500. I didn't buy the house, and that $500 was some of the best money I've spent.
Selling a house in Denmark requires the seller to acquire a “condition report” from a certified inspector. The report is valid for 6 months and costs around $1000. This also ties into the optional “owner transfer insurance” which covers serious defects / building code violations undetectable by the inspectors. The insurance lasts 5 years and costs $2000-$5000
In the US afaict inspections are a plus but not required for sellers to provide. Lots of people were waiving their right to inspection in order to make their offers on houses more attractive to buyers. Kind of a stupid thing to do, but people had low interest rates and were desperate to buy
The same way you hire a company for any service, start by searching for local structural/construction engineering firms and then call a few and ask if they’ll do an inspection on a residence.
If you personally know any architects or general contractors in the residential market, they should be able to recommend someone.
1895 house in Oakland with a soft story condition and a dining room that was cantilevered out over the aisle. It was listed for something like $850k in around 2018, so kind of cheap! But correcting the soft story and the rest of the framing would have been astronomically expensive. He guessed something like 400-500k, and now having experienced home renovations, I am fairly certain he was in the ballpark.
>I've vetoed houses because they back onto nature/wildlife reserves
Why is this a bad thing? To a naive person, it might seem like a good thing, because you get to look out into a forest rather than someone else's yard.
Essentially because nobody was allowed to trim/maintain the trees due to it being a natural habitat. It's nice to look at but when a 60m tree falls in a storm and wipes out your house it's not great. The reserve was also on the north side of the property and down here in the southern hemisphere that means that every year as the trees grow your house gets more and more shade with accompanying maintenance issues.
I should add that people may weigh that up and be happy to live there, but people should be aware of the risk/benefits before they buy. Natural light/property orientation and shading is a major issue that most people forget about.
Here in Western Australia there are online floodplain maps which show the extent of a 100-year event. Very usful when you see somewhere nice but wonder why the house and outbuildings are all crammed in the front quarter of the plot...
get a Chinese feng-shui expert; cheaper than pros and reap benefit of thousands of years of real estate wisdom. /s but not really /s lol there are some methods in it's vast amount of madness
Generally speaking, if inspectors did their jobs well, almost nobody would ever buy a house, due to the prevalence of existing issues and the cost of remediation. I've found that there is a duality of thought among homebuyers, where most want a "perfect" condition house, but also don't want to pay for a perfect condition house. At the same time, home sellers also don't want to pay any more than they absolutely must in order to sell the house, so you end up with inspectors as these not-entirely-impartial middle-men whose job is mostly to CYA while not identifying too many problems that could create a reputation for them that might limit future realtors & home sellers from using them.
It's all pretty silly, really, especially considering the hottest markets, where you either want a house or you don't, and if you you'll probably pay top dollar with no contingencies and possibly not even your own inspection... since the seller knows if you don't buy it someone else is in line right behind you. Most of the time, houses sold this way aren't in significantly worse shape than those that are fully inspected and repairs made before the transaction.
Overall, this has led me to believe that, in most cases, pre-sale inspections don't really benefit anyone, especially since it's so difficult for buyers to seek E&O recourse/damages against either an inspector or seller after the sale closes.
I think it depends on who is paying the inspector. When we bought our house, the realtor we were working with connected us with her best and most rigorous inspector. He found fifty pages worth of stuff that was wrong, but most of them were fairly minor.
We took that list back to the sellers (who were then legally required to provide a copy of that report to other future buyers), and we simply waived the little stuff. We wanted them to fix the big stuff. They didn’t want to do that, so they came down on the price by a considerable amount. He saved us tens of thousands of dollars.
Now, given the problems we’ve had since then which the inspector didn’t identify, we would have paid back more than what he saved us — Except for insurance coverage. USAA is really good about paying out on claims, when many other insurance companies would weasel out.
We love this house, we love this neighborhood. If we had to do it over again, I think we would have pressed harder to get even the minor problems fixed or to get the seller to come down even further on price. But I think we probably would have still bought this house.
I don’t blame the inspector for anything he missed. Most of those problems were well disguised, until such time as there was an actual catastrophic failure. He couldn’t have known. If I knew his name and contact details, I would recommend him to future buyers in the Austin area.
One of the prior houses I lived at had so much flooding and water leakage problems from poor construction (prior additions that weren't strictly legal) that lead to carpet and padding having to be removed from concrete floored rooms and eventually mold problems, that when I bought a house a few years after we'd ran away from that disaster of a house we made absolutely sure to my at the high point of the (new) neighborhood so we weren't in the drainage path for anyone.
It's particularly demoralizing to see the scope of the problem when it's all that water flooding your property and know there's nothing you can do in the short term, and even the long term is just trying different things and hoping they work, knowing that it will probably take a few tries.
Perhaps the balcony over your front door is not properly constructed and is not properly shedding rain, so one day during a torrential thunderstorm you suddenly have a flood coming in OVER your front door.
Perhaps your water heater pan is not draining correctly, and one day you have a catastrophic containment failure in your water heater, causing an interior flood.
Perhaps you change the toilet in an upstairs bathroom, and the new modern toilet is not providing enough water per flush to make the long run of the upstairs plumbing. So, it clogs up over time, then one day it backs up while you’re taking a shower, and you’re standing in multiple inches of grey water. Then the water does slowly drain, but you don’t notice that the pipe has cracked above the clog and it’s actually flooding into the room below, through the light fixture.
Perhaps the main schedule 40 PVC pipe from the water main at the street slowly develops a crack, due to the roots of a tree nearby, and one day you discover that the water pressure in your house is really low and that you have flooded the whole street.
Mine were incorrect drainage outside, causing water to pool high enough inthe back yard that it came through the slider into the converted garage, soaking the pad and carpet there (in a few different locations actually), and the much worse one where a room was build off the same garage onto a concrete pad that was laid, but one of the walls was build on top of a covered deck that was build off the garage on one side, which had water run down it, hid the deck, then immediately go under the wall to the concrete pad meaning even moderate rains that didn't result in outside flooding would result in that room's pad and carpet getting wet and needing to be entirely removed, and the wall ripped out and rebuilt as it eventually was overtaken by mold. A large chunk of the house needed to be blocked off, industrial fans installed to dry it out, and then professionally redone.
Building codes exist for reasons. Sometimes they seem frivolous, but often they're there for a damn good reason.
I've ruled out several properties in my current homebuying search for this exact reason. Having lived next to the neighborhood collection pond once before (a rental thankfully), I'm extra paranoid about stormwater and drainage now.
I've seen a number of homes in my area where the builder received special permission to build right where the drainage needs to go. Some were beautiful and I was tempted to give it a shot, but your story reminds me that I need to trust my gut on this issue and head for high ground.
I have almost exactly the inverse situation. We are at the end of a cul de sac that is capable of efficiently draining water away and out of the neighborhood. But in roughly the spot where your drainage creek is, there's a large strip mall parking lot (across the street from our backyard). We don't get a lot of rain in annual total, but when it does rain heavily a flash flood comes into our backyard and must cross our side/front yard to drain into the cul de sac.
The previous homeowner put in a DIY french drain, but either he didn't do it right, or it's too flat, or it's too small, or it is clogged. We instead get surface water flow and erosion along the same path where the french drain runs.
(It doesn't help that when our neighbors got sand delivered for an above ground pool bed, the delivery truck dumped the entire pile of sand ON TOP OF the river rock exit basin for our french drain. The sand was later removed/used but I was still upset; unfortunately it was my brother in law who ordered the sand. Since the drain is above it I don't think it went in the drain, but maybe this rock basin was supposed to be a dry well.)
I am thinking of building something like your concrete berm along my back fence line, possibly modifying the french drain to just transfer the water from the far side of the berm to the exit over the cul de sac rather than trying to absorb it from the ground.
Sorry to hear of your troubles. We live in Holly Springs, NC not far from Cary. When our builder was showing us land/lots that were available at the time they only had lots that had driveways that would pitch towards the homes (in other words the road was higher than the house, not by much maybe 2-3 feet or so.) Of course developers and realtors always assure you it won’t be a problem - I was not reassured and so we passed on these lots. A few months later a lot became available that was well above street level. We’ve been here 10 years and never had an issue through heavy rains and even a couple of hurricanes. But we’ve met the neighbors who bought those properties with the driveway pitching towards their homes and they complain about having water coming into their garages whenever we get heavy downpours. If you’re going to live somewhere long enough that may experience heavy rainfall, it’s best to be well above the low end of the neighborhood/street.
I live at the bottom of a valley, but luckily in a tiny house on a concrete pad, so I have no basement and I'm raised up two feet off the ground. That works pretty well for the house, but the driveway and yard still floods. So I dug a "pond" and small ditch things to channel water to it. You can't really tell where it is because I let my yard grow wild, but when it rains hard the water fills it up, and it evaporates/drains naturally over a couple days.
The ditch actually speeds up the water drainage. I dug the ditches to divert the water around the property line, so the surface area of ditch in total is large, even though you can't really see it and it doesn't get in the way. I figure at least a quarter of the water drains through the ditch before it gets to the pond. This is probably helped by the fact that the soil is very rocky.
Long story short, we ended up installing a french drain on two sides of our house, putting a drain at the end of our driveway to redirect water [from just running down our driveway to our house], having the front wall foundation rebuilt and jacked up because the footer had nearly completely eroded (1970s house), and still needed to add two 24" square drain boxes in the back yard (with buried 4" PVC draining into the creek at the back of the property) to remediate all this. It was also a tree-filled lot and the drain boxes would almost immediately clog with leaves during heavy rains, so I spent a lot of time out there in ankle to knee deep water with a rake to keep the drains clear.
This still wasn't enough! We got a so much surface run-off from our uphill neighbors that it looked like a sheet of rushing water across our backyard during heavy storms. We had a creek at the back of the property but were not allowed to mess with it because of Corps of Engineers easement regulations. At the end of the day, we finally solved our problems by getting an agreement from our neighbor to let us dig a surface water drain from the low point in their yard into the creek, and then we'd build a "temporary" (cf prior easement rules against permanent walls) berm along the property line to prevent surface water from coming into our yard at all. That "berm" was 76 bags of Qwikrete stacked three high and covered with grass clippings, yard waste & mulch. Technically we could have removed it if the city had inspected, but it was very much a cement wall.
We have never since, and never will, build or purchase a house at the bottom of a hill.