Okay, so what should you do if the house you are buying has vacant land around it? Should you just say, great, no one lives here so we have more privacy? No, you should not is the answer. This land could be a potential problem for you in the future and you need to know what is going on before you buy so that you can make an educated guess on whether your property value is going to go up or down in the future when you attempt to sell your property.
For example, one neighborhood in Cumming Georgia was surprised when a Lowes was built looking down on their home and the security lights of the shopping center were over their homes all night. These lights were reported to be similar to a runway at an airport. When the homeowners went to Lowes, at this point begging for some help, Lowes said that they needed to secure their store and that they could not lower the lights. Someone else I know was shocked to find that a public school was slated to go at the end of their street that they had built a 2 million dollar house on. So, what do you do to get the knowledge that will lead you to a good buying decision?
1. Talk to the neighbors to see what they know about the land.
2. Go to the county and see how the land is classified and if they know of any plans to build.
3. Check your agent’s map book to see if anything is slated there. The school that I was talking about in the above story had been slated there for 10 years.
4. If there is a farm house or something else there, go talk to the owner and see what their plans are and how much land they own.
5. If no one lives there, get your agent to pull the tax records and attempt to call the owner to see what the plans are.
6. If it is green space for the neighborhood, make sure that you verify that with the homeowner’s association or on-site agent and ask plenty of questions. You would certainly be shocked if future plans included a playground, or common amenities that brought people and cars to your home on a daily basis if you did not know about it.
Rhonda Duffy, best known as a consumer advocate and the #1 Agent in Georgia, hosts 2 weekly radio shows on A.M. talk channels in Atlanta, has licensed her business model to 55 cities, is a licensed auctioneer and a master coach in NLP.
[tags]home buying, Georgia Real Estate, house and property, laws, right of way, property lines, buyer tips[/tags]
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