How Flooding Affects the Real Estate Industry

Middle Tennessee has dried out from flooding earlier this year, but what is the next step with your home? How will this affect your real estate? Whether you're planning to repair the damages, or sell and try to start over, there are some important things you should know.

After a flood people who are trying to rebuild their homes need to be aware of repercussions that can come down the road; how does a flood affect the real estate industry?

Well I get conce
ed on a couple of levels. My first conce
is that unfortunately anybody and everybody that can swing a hammer calls themselves a contractor because there is so much demand out there after a flood. If people don't understand how important it is to take care of things correctly, then they are going to be taking care of the same issues again later on down the road; or that soon-to-be buyer is going to be taking care of things later on. For example, flooring can be put down before it is really ready to be put down because a foundation may not have had time to dry out properly.

The other thing I get really conce
ed about with floods right now is that we are already dealing with a stressed market. One out of nine people are behind by 30 days or longer on their mortgage in our country right now. We have people walking away from their homes because they are already upside down - even before a natural disaster happens.

Those are the two huge conce
s that I have.

How does flood damage affect the value of a home?

A flood does not have to permanently affect the value of a home. If the repairs are done properly, the value of the property does not have to be affected other than the possible perception of the neighborhood. If there was a lot of flood damage in the neighborhood where your home is located, it may cause people to have a bad perception of the area. However, those homes that were not affected may see their value increase in some cases.

If you are looking to buy, and you are really trying to be alert and aware, how do you make sure that the work that was done on a house is quality work?

It used to be that anybody who could carry a pencil behind their ear could call themselves an inspector. Nowadays, inspectors are required to maintain a quality of workmanship, or an understanding, or knowledge that is really thorough; so it's really very crucial to get a detail oriented inspector in there to examine that home from top to bottom.

There is now equipment out there will expose things that we didn't have the ability to do just a few years ago.

I want to quickly mentio
"The Clue Report".

The Clue Report is something that gives you the history of the claims made on the property over the last five years. Anybody that has made a claim against a property; the report will show what it was, what company it was, what the problem was, if there was a natural disaster attached to it and all of those kinds of things.

The challenge is that less than 19% of all the problems out there are insured and covered. So if I were buying a home right now, I'd be going for The Clue Report and asking what the history was, I would be examining it thoroughly with the inspector, and I'd be talking to the neighbors because a lot of times the neighbors have better ideas of what took place than anybody else because they see it firsthand.