Why Down by the River?--Chapter 3

“Buy it!”

What should we do? My wife and I needed to make a decision about the house and property on the Lehigh River. We decided to get a second opinion.

My wife asked her parents, who had emigrated from Great Britain when she was four years old and had worked their way up from renting to home ownership. They were now in their fourth house, which they had a contractor build to their specifications. They knew the value of property. Her folks jumped at the opportunity to check out the property and drove by it the next day. Actually, they drove slowly by it several times, then called my wife as soon as they got back home.

“Is it the old, pale yellow farmhouse with the white fence?” her mother asked.

“Yes,” said my wife.

“Does the property include the open grassy area all the way to the end of the white fence?” her father asked.

“Yes.”

“You’re sure it’s all the way to the end.”

“Yes.”

“That’s a lot of land.”

“It’s one and a third acres.”

“Buy it,” her parents said in unison.

“But . . .” my wife began.

“Buy it!” they repeated.

“But the house . . .”

“BUY it!”

“But . . .”

“We know. BUY IT!”

We understood their reasoning. The asking price for the property was only about 25 percent more than one-quarter-acre lots were selling for in the area. But these did not have a dilapidated house to deal with. We knew we didn’t want to go through the unknown cost and stress of renovating the house—visions of the movie, “The Money Pit,” kept going through our heads. We could both see a never-ending project, costs we could not really afford and the risk of an unhappy result.

As it happened, my wife’s sister’s father-in-law, bored with retirement, had recently started a business selling modular homes. We had never thought of a modular home, figuring they all look and feel like mobile homes. Not that we have anything against mobile homes. The first home we ever bought was a mobile home, in Anchorage, Alaska, while I was in the Air Force. We preferred it to living in an apartment. We’ve also owned an RV since 2000. So when we learned that today’s modular homes are almost indistinguishable from “stick-built” homes (as the modular-home people call built-on-site homes), that modulars built by reputable companies are well built and reliable, that there are many agreeable styles (including two-story structures) and that they cost a good deal less than stick-built homes, we decided to give them a look.

With a salesman, we visited a modular home factory about two hours away from our home. We were impressed. The advantages of assembling almost anything inside a building at most times of the year are obvious, and as an engineering management major in college, I could appreciate the industrial and economic aspects. We left the factory with a good feeling about the idea. Putting a modular on the property sounded like an affordable, win-win alternative for us.

Meanwhile, we continued to negotiate with the owners, and eventually reached an agreement on price. A flood survey showed that we would not need to buy flood insurance, because the land was above the 100-year flood level—and actually above the 500-year level. Being within the 100-year flood plain would have made flood insurance a requirement of the mortgage lender, not to mention a prudent thing to do, but would have added about a $1,000 a year to the cost of the house. Besides the cost, we didn’t want to ever have to deal with the consequences of a flood. So the property being within the 100-year flood plain of the Lehigh would have been a showstopper for us. (Ironically, the Lehigh flooded just three months after we moved into our new home. This is worth another blog post later.)

A problem with the designated boundaries of the property, as defined in some dozen previous titles over the years, also turned out favorably. The lines describing one corner of the lot did not actually meet. Why this fact had not been discovered for over a century baffled us. We could only guess that no one thought to check the original faulty survey by checking the geographic survey points closely. The title company our mortgage lender used refused to issue a clear title, which is a requirement of title insurance, which the mortgage lender required as prerequisite of issuing the mortgage. Luckily for us, the text of our standard “boilerplate” purchase agreement specified that the seller must provide a clear title. So our sellers had to pay for the survey.

The new boundaries actually showed the lot to be larger than indicated: 1.77 acres versus 1.35. This was good news for us, but not-quite-good-enough news to alleviate another more serious problem with our plan that my wife had in the meantime discovered during one of her many visits to the township’s planning office.

We knew very early in the process of acquiring the property that it was within a designated recreation and conservation district. What’s not to like about this? You can’t get much better protection from future shopping center or other development than this. What my wife had learned recently, however, was that to build a new house on a property in the area, one needs a minimum of 2.0 acres. Whether 1.35 or 1.77 acres, the property we wanted to buy obviously did not fit this criterium. Neither did several other lots around us, but the houses on these lots—like the house we wanted to buy—were built before the two-acre rule, so they were “grandfathered” under a previous rule. We could, without problem, renovate the old house and even tear it down completely. But if we wanted to build a new house on the property, we could only build it on the footprint of the current house’s foundation. The only alternative we had was to apply for a variance from the rule to build the new house elsewhere on the property, which would have to be located within the current setbacks from the boundaries now required by law.

“OK, so let’s get a variance,” we concluded. Here’s where even our enthusiastic daughter said we should give it up. There were a lot of reasons to quit.

First, we learned it takes a lot of work to get a variance, including notifying all of one’s neighbors to give them an opportunity to comment, for good or ill. Second, getting time to meet with the planning committee is subject to its schedule and the other business it has to deal with. Typically, it met only once a month. Third, our seller wanted to close the deal as quickly as possible because he had a job to go to in Turkey. We also found out he had received another offer for the property, higher than ours, and was looking for any excuse to get out of our agreement. And finally, we also learned that it is only the property owner—not a prospective buyer of a property—who may apply for a variance. Until we actually owned the property we could not apply for a variance to build a new house on the property.

So if we bought the property, we would have to buy it with no guarantee that we could build a new house on it, except over the footprint of the old house, which was close to the road and the neighbor’s house on that side—not an ideal location.

Talk about a showstopper!