Buying a Pre-Owned House
Table of Contents
Buying a Pre-Owned House
Checklist of things you should be watchful of when buying a pre-owned house
When you buy a pre-owned house, it may limit your ability to customize the property according to your preference. You may need to compromise on certain features or undertake renovation work to align the house with your desired design and functionality. Normally, the seller will only offer a 3-month warranty for major structural defects. In addition, for the fittings and equipment, the buyer is usually given only 1 week to claim for damages which are not noted in the contract. For these reasons, it is best to hire a home inspector to look at the entire house and to find any underlying issues that may possibly burden you after you take possession.
Checklist of things you should be watchful of when purchasing a pre-owned house
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Boundary Points
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Road Access
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Road Width
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Height Differences with Adjoining Lots
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Ownership of Boundary Walls and Fences
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Transboundary and Buried Objects
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Soil Contamination
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Climate Risks
Boundary Points
Check if there are clearly marked boundary points with all adjoining lots, and find out who owns the boundary walls and fences. If there are any doubts regarding boundary lines with the neighbors, they should be cleared up by your seller before contract closing as this may create problems for you in the future.
It is always best to have an official survey map signed off by all adjoining landowners before contract closing, which documents that boundary points are marked off and they are mutually agreed upon. Even if there is no official survey map provided by the seller, there should still be visible boundary points, and you can ask the seller to point them out to you at the site. If there are any boundary points in question, the seller shall have it determined with the adjoining landowner before contract closing.
Road Access
Frontal road and frontages are also important aspects when searching for your property. You should determine not only how accessible the house is with your car, but also whether the frontal road is city approved or not. The latter tells you whether you will be allowed to newly build or re-build (collectively called “develop”) your house. If not, then you will not be allowed to develop a house on that site.
Moreover, the frontal road can either be a public or a private road, even if it is city approved. One thing to keep in mind when you become a joint owner of a private road is that, there may be rising costs to maintain the road which you will have to bear. Conversely, if you don’t own any share of the private road that your house fronts, and, for example, if your water pipes run underneath, you may need permission from the owner(s) to excavate the road when you need to fix or replace them, and you may be charged money for that. It is always best to have your seller obtain written permission from the owner(s) of the private road in advance to consent to you using and excavating the road when repair is needed.
The frontage of your property needs to be at least 2 meters wide (sometimes 3 meters is required depending on the length of the passage way), or else a house is not permitted to be developed if you want to rebuild. You should be watchful for land shaped like a flagpole/battle axe which has narrow street access. Points worth noting when you buy a house with a narrow street access are, you can be limited to the type of car you can park, and builders may not be able to access the lot with large vehicles carrying construction equipment, which will result in additional work costs for demolishing, redeveloping, remodeling your house in the future. Not to mention that you may be surrounded in all directions limiting the amount of light the house gets and the view, etc. However, this type of land is generally said to cost 20 -30% less than properties with wider frontages.
Road Width
Within a city-planned area, roads need to be at least 4 meters wide. If your existing frontal road is less than 4 meters wide, or its centerline is less than 2 meters from your lot (or more if stipulated otherwise), you will have to give up land space to make up for the deficit if you ever want to rebuild your house.
Height Differences with Adjoining Lots
You need to look out for any height differences with your immediate neighbors, as you may need to build an earth retainer to align the heights, or build a house with a deep foundation. If there are any old or deteriorating retaining walls between you and your neighbors, they may have to be put up anew if you rebuild as they may not be up to code. The cost for this could be anywhere between a few tens of thousands of yen to a few tens of millions of yen depending on the size, structure, materials used, location, etc. You also need to add the cost to remove the existing old walls. For this reason, be sure to find out who owns the walls with your neighbors if there is doubt on who needs to bear the costs of rebuilding them, so that you will be better prepared to stand your grounds.
Soil Conditions
It is important to know whether the soil in your block of land is strong or weak, which in turn provides your builder with the information needed for a suitable construction technique and the type and depth of the required foundation of the house. You should be cautious when the land is in low lying types of location where it can be affected by floods and heavy rain.
Whether it needs soil improvement or not will have a huge impact on the overall costs of your construction, and you may have a dispute with your seller in respect to who will bear the costs to improve it. Therefore, it may be a good idea to hire a soil engineer to perform soil testing prior to buying the land. However, the majority of sellers will not cooperate with such testing out of the fear that the results may be unfavorable and they may be asked to lower the sales price, or have to shoulder any costs of conducting such test.
You may also want to consider conducting a soil assessment to ensure that the plot of land does not have serious environmental problems such as contaminated soils or polluted water sources. Looking up old maps and closed registries can also tell you the history of the land and how it has been used.
Climate Risks
With recent global climate change, Japan, like many other countries, has suffered from severe floods from unprecedented rainfalls. It is extremely important to make sure your plot of land is not in a flood zone. Not only are floods seen typically in areas near rivers and oceans, but they may also be seen in low lying areas in inland locations, where wastewater treatment capacity cannot keep up with short-time heavy rainfalls which have become more common recently.
Loose saturated sand deposits which are found in reclaimed land, swamps, lagoons, former rivers, coastal regions of big rivers, natural embankments formed from past floods are all prone to liquefaction. Check to see whether or not the plot of land you are planning to buy is in a liquefaction zone which is extremely important in making your purchase decision.
Given that the prices of real estate in Tokyo are still not reflective of climate risks as much as they should, this is a sign of people’s low level of awareness towards frequently occurring natural disasters seen in recent years. It is best you avoid buying real estate prone to natural hazards which could diminish your property values. You should not be blindsided by how great the real estate may look.
