Real Estate: lead paint
May. 30th, 2008 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutThe Boston Globe real estate blog (Real Estate Now) is often annoying, but equally often has really useful tidbits buried in the comments. This blog is a slog, but one that pays off occasionally. Today, I really hit pay dirt.
http://webapps.ehs.state.ma.us/Leadsafehomes/default.aspx
That's a Massachusetts website that lets you look up by address any property you like to see if it has a hazardous report (like, say, lead) associated with it. Lead paint hasn't been legal for 30 years, but maybe a quarter of the houses that otherwise meet our criteria are older than that and I'm in no hurry to completely eliminate that group of houses since I tend to prefer them aesthetically to newer ones and am prepared to do an energy audit to make sure I'm not buying a leaky sieve of a house that will cost a mint to heat and cool.
After doing a little digging on that site for houses that neighbor a house we really like (but don't like the price on), and noting another comment in that blog about the cost of lead abatement (not nearly as bad as I'd imagined -- looks like on the order of $10K or so), it seems reasonable to just include that on our list of shopping criteria.
http://webapps.ehs.state.ma.us/Leadsafehomes/default.aspx
That's a Massachusetts website that lets you look up by address any property you like to see if it has a hazardous report (like, say, lead) associated with it. Lead paint hasn't been legal for 30 years, but maybe a quarter of the houses that otherwise meet our criteria are older than that and I'm in no hurry to completely eliminate that group of houses since I tend to prefer them aesthetically to newer ones and am prepared to do an energy audit to make sure I'm not buying a leaky sieve of a house that will cost a mint to heat and cool.
After doing a little digging on that site for houses that neighbor a house we really like (but don't like the price on), and noting another comment in that blog about the cost of lead abatement (not nearly as bad as I'd imagined -- looks like on the order of $10K or so), it seems reasonable to just include that on our list of shopping criteria.