So you’re house shopping and you’ve fallen hard for a sweet little gem that seems, well, perfect. The photos are lovely, the walk-through revealed a number of amenities you’ve been seeking, the location is ideal.
This is it, right?
Not necessarily. A house — even a brand-new one — comes with a history and literally thousands of diverse components, some of which could be defective and cost big bucks to fix. A buyer’s ability to diagnose potential problems during a short visit? Limited at best.
As a result, shopping for a home, like any potential relationship, can include elements of uncertainty, surprise and trepidation.
“I’m super paranoid,” says Jacob Moschler, a Hyattsville resident who’s been gradually moving toward homeownership with his wife, Thuan Do, but is nervous about choosing a home that winds up having a host of problems. “That’s one of the reasons we haven’t bought a house yet.”
A buyer, though, doesn’t have to jump wholly unaware into the unknown. There are a number of ways to gain information about the property — both its physical condition as well as its past — before buying.
There are several tools and sources to help you feel a little more secure before signing on that dotted line. Some are mandated by law, while others simply require a little extra legwork.
States and status
The first thing to know is that the District, Maryland and Virginia each holds home sellers to different standards of disclosure.
The District has the tightest standards; a seller is obligated to fill out a detailed form outlining the state of a range of components — including the roof, chimney, plumbing and electrical system — related to the house. Virginia, in contrast, is a “caveat emptor” state. That means sellers don’t have to fill out any form detailing the property’s condition; buyers largely have to unearth that information on their own.
Maryland’s system is a hybrid of the two. Sellers can choose to disclaim — that is, to give no additional information about the home — or they can fill out a disclosure form.
Those are the real estate laws. But common law in all three jurisdictions requires sellers to disclose any “latent defects” they know of that affect the property — problems that pose health or safety dangers but can’t be discovered by a reasonably thorough inspection before sale. That might include a rotted supporting pillar or a flawed electrical system whose malfunctioning isn’t apparent without deep investigation. After all, for a seller to pretend that a home functions well when he knows it doesn’t is fraud. And that’s punishable in court.
So all Washington area home buyers have that layer of protection. A second, broader one comes in the form of the agent selling the property. In all three jurisdictions, the seller’s agent is required to disclose any material fact that he or she knows or should know relating to the property. Translation: If agents or brokers are aware of a problem that might affect the buyer’s decision about the house — or if they should know about an issue, given their expertise — then they are obligated to tell it. This includes a much wider group of issues than the latent-defect category — for example, a leaky roof or basement that floods both qualify as material facts.
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