30 year rule of dated houses..

This is the time it takes for all the kids to be born (usually over a 10-20 year span) then out to college add 20…now a family has lived in a house about 30 years…. Dated, deferred repairs…generally a really nice, but used up house… rarely people stay in a house the full 50 years…if they do, it is then more a museum, to a different era, with passageways thru rooms, strange attic spaces, old fashioned telephone niches,

The buyer has to lose about 20% of reno costs just to repair all the old stuff, THEN, start moving walls, adding rooms, gutting kitchens and bathrooms.

In a 700K house, this would be 140K for repairs, (old windows, electrical panel, not enough electrical sockets, outdated ceiling lighting, bad plumbing & hot water heaters, old ceiling fans,  wood rot, siding, HVAC, ROOF, GUTTERS, landscaping, foundation things, crawl space mold and rot, cracked driveway, sidewalks…just old stuff) THEN start doing the fun stuff, the stuff that shows, the stuff you can SEE….you have to be quite the optimist to face someone elses “I am too tired, to broke, to busy” chore list.

When a really old house, comes up for sale, the estate sale buyers keep saying…’oh, THEY will just tear this down, and put up something new….presuming the buyer is the bad guy….but, reconsider… the OWNER that LOVED this house for 50 years… neglected to FIX things over time…. Do they have any fault, that their house will be torn down?

If you have to spend over 300K in repairs or teardown costs….then the only way to recoup that money is putting up MORE square feet, which and absorb the tear down costs of old house,.

30 YEAR RULE DEFERRED MAINTANANCE