Episode 4 | PropertyLens Shocking Findings in a $650K Home
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In This Episode
Hosts: Bob Frady & John Siegman
Property: 7 Walnut Avenue North Hampton, NH 03862
Topics: roofage icedams homebuying propertyinspection
Episode Summary
Buying a home? Don’t get blindsided by hidden property risks! In this episode, Bob and John break down a real property report for a 64-year-old home in North Hampton, New Hampshire, revealing potential red flags buyers and agents often overlook. They discuss why roof age estimates can be misleading, how ice dams can cause interior damage, and the hidden risks of unpermitted renovations. Plus, they highlight the importance of checking for lead paint, asbestos, and other age-related hazards in older homes. Whether you're a homebuyer, real estate agent, or investor, this episode will equip you with practical insights to make smarter property decisions.
Key Takeaways
✅ Roof age data isn’t always accurate—always verify with the seller
✅ Ice dams can cause costly interior damage—gutter guards help!
✅ Unpermitted renovations can impact insurance & taxes—double-check records
✅ Properties built before 1978 may have lead paint & asbestos—inspect thoroughly
Resources
🔹 Try it: Propertylens.com
🔹 Questions? Contact us: support@propertylens.com
Transcript
[00:00:00] Bob Frady: Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Property of the Week from PropertyLens. I am Bob Frady.
[00:00:18] John Siegman: I'm John Siegman,
[00:00:20] Bob Frady: two of the three co-founders of PropertyLens. For those of you who don't know who we are, we're taking names. So we're going to find out who you are. I'm going to keep sending you advertising.
[00:00:29] But for those of you who don't know who we are, we gather thousands of data elements across the country. Run it through thousands of rules to try to help generate the questions that you should ask of a seller before you buy a property.
[00:00:48] So normally what we do is we pick a place at random, but we're not doing that this time. Do you know why, John?
[00:00:55] John Siegman: No, Bob. Tell me why.
[00:00:57] Bob Frady: Because one of our friends said, Hey, can you look at this area? So we decided, sure. It's like, we don't mind. We'll play roulette. Demo roulette. And so we are looking at North Hampton, New Hampshire, a wicked nice place, as they would say in, in some areas. So we picked a house at random. That's the random part that we did. That's for sale right now.
[00:01:23] And we decided we'll run a PropertyLens report. Normally we would show you how we do it, but that's kind of boring. You go to propertylens.com, you type in an address and follow the instructions. If you have any trouble, hit the support button. And then the report comes out usually in less than a minute or so.
[00:01:39] So we'll skip all that part and we'll just go straight to the report and we can see the PropertyLens Report for 7 Walnut Avenue in North Hampton, New Hampshire. Two bedrooms, one bath, it's 64 years old, it's 1,600 square feet on a third of an acre lot. Lovely.
[00:01:55] The first thing that we show you is the Buyer Lens, which is, hey, you're buying a house. Are you thinking about buying a house? What questions do you ask the seller or the seller's agent? And John, why do you want to ask the seller's agent these questions?
[00:02:09] John Siegman: You want to ask the seller or the seller's agent these questions because disclosure rules vary across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. And the one constant that is apparent in all of the places that have disclosure reports is that if you ask the seller, they have to tell you the truth to the best of their ability.
[00:02:33] Bob Frady: Correct. And sometimes the answer is, I don't know. They have someone, maybe they bought it a few years ago, they didn't know what happened before. We try to gather as much data as possible to help thin those gaps as well.
[00:02:45] So, John, what do we see here in the BuyerLens?
[00:02:48] John Siegman: Well, we see that this house is exposed to wind. The roof is in great shape. It's now 64 years old. that is the age of the house. And the, it's likely to have an ice dam.
[00:03:03] Bob Frady: Here's the thing.
[00:03:03] Here's the thing. There's a reason why it says the age is 64 years old, of the roof.
[00:03:08] John Siegman: Number one, a place has exceptionally lousy permitting or does not require permitting.
[00:03:16] Bob Frady: That's number one. What's number two?
[00:03:19] John Siegman: Number two would be that, the condition of the roof and the age of the roof are two very different variables.
[00:03:28] Bob Frady: Okay. I'm teething here. It's like, here's the reason. It's because not every municipality publishes permits in a way that's easily accessible. So, for example, the town of Hampton, North Hampton, New Hampshire does publish building permits, but they publish it like this, and that's really hard to gather. So, they're there.
[00:03:50] But we don't necessarily have them. So what you want to do in that case is you want to make sure that you ask the owner of the property, have any permits been pulled? How old is this roof? Because right now the data is showing that it's the original roof for the house because we have no other indicator that says it's not.
[00:04:11] A super important question to ask. All right. So, got lots of questions about the roof. What else, we got?
[00:04:19] John Siegman: You got some mold, they've got humidity. It's, you know, it's near water. so, you know, you would want to check for that. And then, you know, they've got heavy snow loads. Do you want to make sure that you don't have just two by fours as your timbers up in your rook?
[00:04:39] Bob Frady: It's The Winter. New Hampshire loves its winter. We also know the property is 64 years old and a lot of stuff's not reported. So you want to check the mechanicals of Also, it's been built before 1978. John, have you ever renovated a house that was built before 1978?
[00:04:55] John Siegman: No, I have never had the pleasure. But I know somebody in this conversation who has.
[00:05:00] Bob Frady: Three times I've done this, three times I've renovated a house that was built before 1978. Lead paint and asbestos were present in all of them. Knob-in-tube wiring was present in one of them. And poor insulation was in two of them.
[00:05:14] So it is all of these things you have to check for. Ask if any lead paint has been found. Look for asbestos lined pipes, especially, especially in areas where it gets cold. A lot of the pipes in the house will be lined with asbestos. You got to remediate that at some point, and you want to make sure that you ask before you end up with a big surprise bill about remediating asbestos. The house has a basement.
[00:05:38] You want to check on the condition. No solar at this property. If you want to, it's going to cost you about 18 grand, a payback period of about eight years. And there's a difference between assessor information and MLS records for this property.
[00:05:51] John, what does that indicate?
[00:05:53] John Siegman: That indicates that somebody did something and that the permit was never Either polled or the information was never updated at the county assessor level.
[00:06:04] Bob Frady: Correct. because listen, people don't tell municipalities sometimes about improvements that they made to the house because they don't want to pay more taxes. But they do tell the realtor because they want to get more money for the house. So you got to ask, why is there a difference? Has there been an improvement done to this property?
[00:06:24] So from an inspector standpoint. You want to look at what in this location, John?
[00:06:29] John Siegman: Well, you definitely want to take a look at the roof, even though we say it's in great shape. You want to make sure that it truly is. You want to check for gutter guards, your favorite thing, keeping out the ice dams. You want to check the dark and dank places, that would fester mold. And then, you know, you want to check the insulation for any pipes that are running on the outside of the house.
[00:06:54] Bob Frady: When I was a kid, I grew up outside. I grew up in Boston. And when you had to dig icicles hanging down from your house, it looked cool. But, it's not so cool when you own the house, and all that water builds up, and then floods you on the inside in the middle of winter, and you get an ice dam.
[00:07:09] Awful, awful, awful. Okay, from an insurance standpoint, what do we see?
[00:07:13] John Siegman: Well, it's an old house. So, it's going to cost more to insure. just because. if you, if something bad, really bad happens, you'd have to bring it up to code and code costs more than how it was built 64 years ago, because the code has probably changed many, many times.
[00:07:30] You would want to take a look at, again, the roof, being important to this house. We know it's in great shape, so not a major concern. And then you want to make sure that you ensure it. for at least $184,000 to cover the replacement costs.
[00:07:48] Bob Frady: Yeah, and we, when we take a look at the historical premiums for this area, it's pretty cheap. You're not looking at a huge insurance bill because it's New Hampshire. You know, not a lot happens in New Hampshire, which is from a, from a catastrophic weather standpoint. It can, but it, but it usually doesn't. So the insurance rates reflect the risk of both the property itself and the area. So pretty cheap insurance.
[00:08:18] Okay, so we give you a lots of overview of the data. Here's all the data, from the assessor. Here's the data from the MLS. Here's the market values, about $650,000. Here's the description, all the things that you would see on the MLS listing last sold in 2021. Here's what the ownership looks like over time.
[00:08:39] So you can see the sale here was last sold for $500,000. It was listed for $650,000, not a bad turnover profit for three years. and then here's the property tax history. We're missing 2018, but it's been about $5,300 a year in property taxes.
[00:08:57] And here's pictures of the property. You can see it for yourself what it looks, a nice, nice little house. Here's the roof condition. Now, here's what we see is the problem with roof age, because we don't have any other indicators to say that this is not an original roof. It's a shingle roof material. And the range of costs to repair that is between $6700 and $14,000.
[00:09:17] And John, why do we always pick the high number in this case?
[00:09:20] John Siegman: Because sooner or later, you're going to be at that number.
[00:09:24] Bob Frady: Yeah, it's like no surprises. And if somebody comes in and says, Hey, it's $10,000 to replace the roof, it's like, Hey, great. But if you're budgeting for a roof replacement, then you want to know what the high end of the cost is going to look like. So we go through here, the roof looks in pretty good condition.
[00:09:37] It's about an 1,100 square foot roof cover. There haven't been a lot of damaging events, some wind, and we measure wind in excess of 65 miles per hour or greater is what we look at as a wind. if you want to take a look at the property over time and see what it looked like, say, between 2024 and 2020. It looks pretty similar.
[00:10:02] You can even go back further if you want to, to 2018. See how it looks pretty similar. There you go. So we gave you the ability to page through multiple versions of the data. We don't have any permits for this location. We'll work on getting them, but we don't have them yet.
[00:10:22] we don't have inspection data. Here's what the utilities should cost. About 150 a month. depending upon the time of year. That's the electricity costs. And if you wanted to get a solar system, it would pay you back in about 12 years. It costs you about $18,000. carbon footprint of utility for those of you who are concerned about things like that.
[00:10:43] What's interesting about this is I just learned this the other day. We talked to some friends who do electrical measurement and some of them, depending upon the type of electricity that your utility is putting out, it can cause surges in your electricity coming to your house. They could potentially cause a problem.
[00:11:02] I will work more on that to get some more information around it, but this gives you an idea that most of the power for this location is nuclear generated. Here's the different risks. And of course it's winter. It's New Hampshire. Here's a chance. Here's the flood risk. If you have really unusual rain, there might be some level of flood risk, but you don't have to have insurance.
[00:11:25] It's not in a FEMA hundred year digital flood zone. It's not in a five million year flood zone. and it would have to be a super unusual storm, for flood insurance to kick in. So if you wanted to get flood insurance, it's going to be pretty cheap. let's see, what else we got? We got weather data, there's pretty much winter risks, wind, a little wildfire.
[00:11:49] What's interesting is there's a lot of wildfires going on in New England right now because they've had a lot of drought. And then what do we got? Environmental pollution. There's some forever chemicals around here. There's a nuclear site nearby. and there's a little bit of risk of radon. It's not hugely elevated, but there's a little bit.
[00:12:10] Seabrook Power Plant is five and a half miles away for those of you who are concerned about things like that. There's this, there's a nearby Superfund site on Atlantic Avenue. there's some leaking underground storage tanks around you. but luckily there's no, no meth labs. It's always nice. Don't know any meth labs in the area.
[00:12:28] insurability. John, let's talk about replacement costs a little bit.
[00:12:33] John Siegman: The replacement cost looks at if everything bad happened to your house and it was totally destroyed. Okay. How much is it going to cost to replace the house? It looks at the labor costs in your area, materials costs, permits, and to bring your house back up to code.
[00:12:50] So this house being 64 years old, there's probably been a lot of code changes since then.
[00:12:56] Bob Frady: Yup. And there's not a lot of bad things that are going to drive the cost of your insurance up. So, if you want, you have the ability to go get a quote. for the house, so you can check before you move in how much exactly it's going to cost.
[00:13:09] We don't see any claims, the neighborhood's okay, it's average. you got fire hydrants around, you've got police and fire and hospitals close by. So, you know, a relatively safe neighborhood. And then finally, the detailed history of the report. Now, listen, we're not saying that you should or shouldn't buy this house.
[00:13:29] That's really up to you. But we're saying that here's all the things you need to look out for before you buy this house. So, John. So, given everything that we've seen, what are the three things that you would look for at 7 Walnut in North Hampton, New Hampshire?
[00:13:48] John Siegman: I would look for ice dams, I would look at the roof condition, and I would look for loose siding because of the wind.
[00:14:00] Bob Frady: Okay. So if I were looking at this house, based upon the data in this report, I would look at number one, is the roof really 64 years old? You know, so get. An update on the condition of the roof from the owner. Maybe there's been a permit pulled, you know, maybe there's been something that's changed this. It looks like it hasn't changed from the Salady roof and it hasn't been recently. How old is this roof? If it's older than 25 years, you get a budget for a re-roof. so that's number one is the roof.
[00:14:34] Number two is the basement. There's a basement at this property, and when it gets cold, frozen pipes can happen. So you want to make sure that pipes aren't located close to exterior walls, and if they are, that they're very well insulated. You can do that simply by walking around the basement.
[00:14:49] And the third is, have there been things like ice dams? In the past, gutter guards, gotta get your gutter guards, keep those leaves out. New Hampshire has a lot of pretty trees, those pretty leaves end up in your pretty gutters, clog them up, cause bad problems, so get your gutter guards on there, relatively inexpensive fix to help drain that water, when it comes to your roof.
[00:15:12] So, there we go, there's a look at North Hampton, North Hampton, New Hampshire, a beautiful place if you've never been there, might as well, you should go. And, anything else you want to add, John?
[00:15:25] John Siegman: No, I think you've covered it all.
[00:15:27] Bob Frady: For this episode of Property of the Week, I'm Bob Frady.
[00:15:32] John Siegman: And I'm John Siegman.
[00:15:34] Bob Frady: Alright, well, till next time. Oh yeah, by the way, if you're on YouTube, click that subscribe button down there.
