Copyright Kiplinger Washington Editors Apr 1997| [Headnote] |
| Plus, what you should tell before you sell. |
You'll hear plenty about the dangers of lead-based paint if you try to buy or sell a home this spring. You can be forgiven, however, if the warnings leave you wondering what to do.
This much is clear: According to a federal law that went into effect in December, sellers of homes built before 1978-the last year that leadbased paint was sold-must give buyers a brochure from the Environmental Protection Agency outlining lead hazards and ways to reduce the risk of lead poisoning. Sellers must also disclose any test information they already have and allow ten days for a lead inspection, if the buyer wishes to pay for one.
RISKS FOR BUYERS
Whether, when and how you should test depends a lot on how much your family is at risk for lead poisoning.
Lead chips and dust are especially dangerous for children under age 6, whose immature nervous systems are most sensitive to the poison, and families who are worried about lead might want to avoid old houses altogether. But if you're in the market for an older house, you will probably be better off having a thorough risk assessment done. Expect to pay $120 to $250 for the necessary tests, depending on where you live.
Marybeth and Michael Drusano were expecting a new baby within weeks of their March closing date on a 27-year-old house in Lutherville, Md., a Baltimore suburb. With 3year-old Ryan and 18-month-old Caroline rounding out their household, they fit the profile of a family at risk.
Before they sealed their deal, the Drusanos paid an environmentaltesting company $120 to do a leadhazard assessment on the house, including half a dozen dust-wipe samples that were sent off to a laboratory for measurement. The samples came back clean.
TOUGHEST TESTS. If you're planning to remodel by tearing down any walls that could raise dangerous lead dust, it's a good idea to go for the most expensive testing option, x-ray fluorescence (XRF), which peers through layers of paint to detect the presence of lead. The price for XRF testing varies. In San Francisco, for example, whole-house testing costs $500 to $1,000, but can cost as much as $1,500 for a very large house. On the East Coast, the price range is roughly $350 to $500. Typically you'll also need to pay another $250 or so for advice on how to manage the risk and how much removing or sealing off any lead hazards will cost.
WHAT IF YOU FIND LEAD? The EPA's brochure notes that, in most cases, lead-based paint that is in good condition is not a hazard. "You do not want to disturb a lead-painted surface unless you need to," warns Larrie Lance, a public-health official who works with the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Branch of the California Department of Health Services, in Emeryville, Cal. "There are alternatives to tearing out painted wood-paneling or painting with a thick paint called an encapsulant, which bonds with the lead and is supposed to last 20 years."
In the worst-case scenario, buyers can hire a lead-abatement contractor to remove the lead hazard-for example, by replacing all the windows and frames, a common source of lead dust, and then cleaning up any hazardous dust raised during construction.
If you find unacceptable levels of lead in the home, you may find yourself back at the negotiating table talking about a change in price. "It's just like negotiating who's going to pay points and closing costs," says Sharon Millett, a broker in Auburn, Maine. You may want to specify in your purchase contract what constitutes an acceptable level of lead and stipulate that the deal is off if the lead level is too high.
STRATEGIES FOR SELLERS
Lead inspectors are trying to sell homeowners on the idea of inspecting for lead before they place their house on the market. Mark Mitchell, president of Pro-Tect Franchising Inc., an Oyster Bay, N.Y., company that sells lead-testing franchises, says, "If you know about it ahead of time, you have an opportunity to get abatement estimates. If you decide not to do anything about it, then you're negotiating with that in the mix."
But test results can mark your property forever. Melvin Knight, a Baltimore real estate agent who specializes in historic homes and has helped draft state legislation on lead testing, suggests that sellers leave the choice of testing up to the buyers. "The downside to testing is that once you know the results, you are obligated by federal law to disclose that to all potential buyers," he says.
Here's the dirt on landscape software
For about the price of a one-hour consultation with an in-the-flesh landscaper, you can consult a CD-ROM landscaper on your personal computer and get advice for as many hours as you care to listen.
We tried several programs to see which provided the most bloom for the buck. The best offer not only encyclopedic advice on choosing plants but also professional tips on pulling together a landscape plan. All the programs we tried require at least a 486 processor, a CD-ROM drive, a sound card and speakers.
Land Designer (Sierra Productivity; street price, $25) offers the best balance of landscape-design advice and plant information. Its design wizards help you draw your plan, including sidewalks and driveways, a vegetable garden and even a sprinkler system. (It uses computer graphics instead of photos, but the wizards save you from having to do all the tricky computer drawing from scratch.) You can lift good ideas from its 30 sample landscapes. Search through an encyclopedia of 2,000 trees, shrubs, flowers and ground-cover and edible plants, and come away with information on plant care, environmental requirements, hardiness-even recipes. The program pronounces difficult botanical names for you.
Planix Photo Landscape (Softdesk, $50) is the best choice if what you want is an actual photographic view of what your house will look like with a new sidewalk and shrubs-now and ten years from now, after the shrubs have grown. You scan in a photograph of your own house, and the program does the rest. (If you don't have a scanner, many copy shops will put a photograph on floppy disk for about $10.)
Planix offers a good tutorial: A designer walks you through one of his projects, describing how to scale the trees, flowers, shrubs and sidewalks to the right size to fit the scene, while you watch the cursor move automatically onscreen. The program has a good selection of photos of plants, birdbaths, sidewalk pavers and even statuary. You can also change your house-paint color and add landscape lighting.
A big drawback is that the program does not offer a plant encyclopedia. If you click on a picture of a Canadian hemlock, you'll see a photo but you won't learn that the tree could eventually grow to 90 feet, or whether it will grow in your region.
3D Landscape (Books That Work, $60) uses computer graphics instead of photos, so the surreal three-dimensional views are this program's least useful features. The drawing functions may take a weekend or more to master unless you're already familiar with computer graphics. But the twodimensional layouts make it easy to plan a course of action or to direct the hired help who will actually plant your masterpiece. You can also see whether the plants will grow so big that they'll overwhelm the house.
The program's most useful feature is its data base of 1,848 plants, including prices. You can supplement it with the Garden Encyclopedia CDROM ($30), which describes another 1,500 plants and provides Internet connections. You can search by common or botanical names (which the computer will pronounce for you), hardiness zones, bloom type, and other specifics.
Perfect Plants (Maxis, $40) comes with the 320-page book of the same name by British gardeners Roger Phillips and Martyn Rix. It could be described as a botanist's Masterpiece Theatre. Although it offers no landscape layout features or information about sidewalks or fountains, gardeners who revel in the subtleties of rose varieties, for example, can watch video clips on "Training Bourbon Roses," or take narrated tours of six British and American gardens. Or choose one of the program's musical selections (something by Joseph Haydn, perhaps) and sit back while the computer leafs through the data base, displaying photo after photo of flowers and plants. When one strikes your fancy, you can pause the slide show to call up information on the plant's history and cultivation.
Among its drawbacks, the program uses mostly botanical names, and while it gives you hardiness information, you'll have to find out elsewhere what climatic zone you live in.
Online deals in foreclosures
Mortgage lenders don't always like to advertise that they're selling houses they've foreclosed on after the owners couldn't make the mortgage payments. They're afraid such information will attract only low-ball offers.
Not so with the three largest real estate finance organizations in the country. All of them have searchable Web sites listing their inventory of foreclosed houses. Fannie Mae (http://www.fanniemae.com/ Homebuyer/hb_foreclose.html) and Freddie Mac (http://www.homes .freddiemac.com/info/info.html)--the two corporations that buy mortgages and package them to sell as mortgage-backed securities-and the Federal Housing Administration (http://www.hud.gov/sfamprop.html) each list hundreds of homes, searchable by state, that are sold through real estate brokers. FHA first offers the houses to people who intend to live in them; after marketing a house for a "priority period" of several weeks, investors are allowed to bid through any licensed broker.
Because people being evicted sometimes vandalize a property before they give it up, you may find that foreclosed houses need more repairs. That holds down prices, however and offers a good chance of buying at a discount, especially if the faults are mostly cosmetic.
REPORTER: ATILLA AKGUN