Are there any building products I should be concerned with when buying an investment property?
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Welcome back to Go Gaddis Real Estate Radio right here on AM nine 20, the Answer. I'm Cleve Gaddis and I appreciate you joining us on this Saturday morning. The purpose of this show is simple. It is to help listeners, all listeners, all ages, all backgrounds, go from real estate, novice to real estate. So home selling and buying can be done with total confidence and without all the worry that's typical with life's biggest investments.
Long story short, we don't want you to learn anything at closing or after that you should have learned before, and we are committed to that. If you want to reach us, I'll offer you two different ways to do that. Number one, you can go to go gaddis radio.com, G O G A D D I S radio.com. You can ask questions, you can make comment.
You can ask questions by the way that you want us to answer on the air or off the air. Either way is fine with us. In fact, I would say I probably answer 60 or 70% of the questions off the air instead of on the air. You can push back, you can challenge anything we're saying. You can share your ideas. You can request your neighborhood be featured in our neighborhood spotlight, and I encourage you to do that if you're trying to learn more about the real estate market in your neighborhood.
If you're wondering what has been happening in my. Go to Go gadi radio.com. You can click on Neighborhood Spotlight, put in a little information and we will respond to you as quickly as possible. You can also subscribe to our podcast we would love for every single person who has ever listened to this radio show.
To become a podcast listener, go to go gadi radio.com. Click on podcast. It'll give you a link to whatever your favorite podcasting platform platform is, and you can sign up for our podcast and I encourage you to do that. We've got a couple listener questions. The first one is, how do I narrow down the area in which I should purchase my Atlanta home?
We're relocating from New Jersey and are unfamiliar with the area. Now, I don't know how many of you listening actually relocated to Metro Atlanta from another area. Those. Can relate or have done that. I'm sure you can relate. You're moving to a new city. You maybe have some recommendations from some friends.
The reality is you, um, the reality is you don't really know where it is that you need to live. And that is a very, very frustrating feeling. And so home buyers who work with the Modern Traditions Realty Group, that's my real estate team here in metro. We use a system called the She Home Buying System, and it is a 71 step process that's designed to make sure that you know everything you need to know as a buyer before you move forward with a real estate transaction.
I know that's a big, big, bold statement. Uh, sir, there's no way of letting everybody know every last little thing, but we want to uncover every stone. We want to be able to give you all of the information that you might not otherwise get, and. As part of that program, we recommend a process called getting to know the area.
And if you're working with another real estate broker and they're not doing this for you, then just ask them maybe if they can do this for you. So certainly we're gonna narrow down the area, the choices, the potential areas. You know, distance from work, uh, if someone is commuting to work different distance from schools, preferred schools, um, you know, the amenities, people move to Atlanta and they need to be near hospitals or they need to be near the tech corridor because they have a tech job.
And, you know, that is certainly gonna determine the area in which you can live. Meaning you can't just live, live anywhere. You've got to have. You know, some starting point, but let's just say for example, somebody was going to move to Metro Atlanta and they were going to have a job that was in, um, let's just say it was in, uh, DeKalb County, and it was right where.
Uh, Dunwoody and Sandy Springs meet, so they were gonna be very near the intersection of 2 85 and 400. You know, this person might say, well, I am okay doing up to a 40 or 45 minute commute, which could mean they could live in Roswell. They could live in Marietta, they could live in Smyrna. They might even be able to live in Tucker.
They might be able to live in Doraville right at the southern end. Gwinnett County. And so the question is, if we have four or five areas that we'd like to consider, you're certainly gonna consider schools. You're gonna consider crime in the area. You're gonna consider all of the things that you need to consider.
And if your agent is not helping you with that, you need to make sure you encourage them to do that or consider talking to another agent. But my suggestion for you is you decide the price range, and let's say that your particular price range was 575. Up to 650,000. Then what I would recommend is that you would look at a couple of homes in Roswell that meet that criteria.
Then a couple of homes in Marietta that meet that criteria. A couple of homes in Smyrna that meet the criteria. A couple of homes in Doraville, a couple of homes in Tucker, maybe a couple of homes in Peachtree Corners that would be close enough to. Commute to work for a 30 minute commute, and it is, it, the most amazing thing happens and I, I can't say that it happens all the time because that wouldn't be appropriate just to generalize and say it happens all the time.
But I've never seen it not happen as long as I've been in the business. My family's been in real estate for 37 years. I've been in real estate for 22 years. Uh, doing it full-time for 20. Years. And what happens is when you go and you drive through an area and you see everything you have to drive through and what you get to experience, and then you see the entrance of the neighborhood, the subdivision, you see, you know, the kids or the lack of kids, or you see, you know, the neighbors that you're, you're, uh, you know, able.
To see, hey, what does my neighborhood look like? And I'm not saying we should stereotype or judge where we're gonna live based specifically on our neighbors, but you get to experience the area and once you combine the actual homes themselves, what do they look like and what do you get in certain areas?
Once you combine that with the feeling of driving up to and experiencing that neighborhood and that area, I think it is very, very, To narrow down the area in which you want to live. So my question for the listener who wanted to know how to narrow down the areas is this is how will you know k and o w what you want to buy?
And the truth is, and the best answer to that question is, you will know k and o w what you want to buy when you know, when you know what you're saying. No, n O. So the way you know that you're ready to buy something you see that you should be ready to buy is by seeing enough things that aren't your cup of tea and that don't fit all of your criteria.
So, and I'm not saying you need to look at 20, 30, 50 homes, I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying you need to look at 12, 15, 18 homes and you need to get in the best cross section of all of the areas in which you are considering living. And I. The choice will become clear if you've just joined us, you're listening to Go Gaddis Real Estate Radio right here on AM nine 20, the answer.
My name is Steve Gaddis and I appreciate you joining us. As always, we've got another listener question, and the question is a great one. All of them are great questions, but is a great one. Are there any building products, building materials I should be concerned with when buying an investment property in metro?
and the answer is yes, from the late eighties and let's call it until just after 2000. There were a lot of homes in Atlanta built with. Products that later became, uh, targeted in class action lawsuits. And there are three things that I would focus on specifically, although I know there are class action lawsuit, uh, not lawsuit or judgements or settlements on, uh, circuit breaker boxes and, and lots of things that we're not gonna talk about today.
Certain types of drywall, things like that. These are the main categories that I would be sensitive to. Number one, that would be the siding. The exterior cladding of the home. There were press board, and those are pieces of siding that looked like lap board siding. They look like wood, but they're actually just, it's cardboard that's extruded through a machine under high pressure, and then sort of laminated on the front, back, top and bottom.
And it was designed to be an inexpensive way to protect homes from the weather. The issue is that the way some of those. Siding boards were manufactured, and more importantly, and in most cases the way they were installed caused them to fail. So you weren't really supposed to nail the siding on the bottom lip as it lipped over the siding underneath it.
And and contractors would do that, and it would allow moisture to get into the siding, cuz remember I said it's extruded cardboard. So if moisture gets inside, it's gonna swell up like a sponge. And then the whole bottom lip, if you will, of that siding, swells up. It starts to open up, and then as it rains, it literally just wicks water up into the siding.
I mean, like it's wicking up into a cotton ball. It just wicks water up into the siding. I have seen inside of a garage in Peachry corners, 15, 16 years ago where they had no wallboard on the inside, so we could see the back of the siding and it. Louisiana Pacific or Masonite or, or one of the siding that had a geor that had a lawsuit on it in Georgia or across the country, there were mushrooms growing on the backside of the siding.
Now, I don't know about you, but I don't really want any mushrooms growing on my siding. The second item I would be concerned with is plumbing. . I would be concerned with any home that has Polybutylene plumbing. I'm not saying Atlanta, that I would not buy a home that has Polybutylene plumbing, cuz I might very well buy one with Polybutylene Plumbing.
But I would remove all the Polybutylene, not myself. There's a couple of companies in Metro Atlanta if you need to know who they are. There's a couple of companies that specialize in swapping. Uh, polybutylene Plumbing for Pex Plumbing or copper plumbing, or whatever it is, you want it, they're not very invasive.
They don't tear up the house a whole lot. And, but I would replace that, that polybutylene piping tends to fail, so you get these pinhole leaks in it, and they believe it's because of the interaction between the chlorine and the water. And the sun as they maybe stored the product outside and the piping that just caused pinhole leaks.
I have had neighbors that have come home from a vacation and had the ceiling of their dining room laying in the floor because of a pinhole leak in their polybutylene plumbing. The third thing I would look for, Is synthetic stucco. Synthetic stucco is stucco that is applied over a piece of styrofoam, like a styrofoam cooler.
And that was the subject to class action lawsuits. And it was because it was not installed correctly and moisture would get behind the wall, and then you would have all kinds of havoc behind the wall due to the moisture. So those are the three things that I would. Careful for, for the person who is looking to move to Metro Atlanta as an investor, uh, and wants to know what building products they should worry about.
We're gonna take a quick break When we come back in our next segment, we're gonna feature three chimneys incoming in our neighborhood Spotlight. Stick with us. We'll be back.
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