The obvious facts do not need to be disclosed. ;-) This is no different than buying river front or mountain top property.
Interesting. I live directly on the Chattahoochee in Atlanta. Erosion, here, is not a issue. I have a worse case idea of the flood possibility except if terrorists blow up the damn dam upstream. Then what the hell, the whole city's in trouble.
Interestingly, the highest I've seen the river is when Hurricane Opal came through Atlanta. That should have been an omen for me, I guess.
Even in the unlikelyhood that it did flood, a few hundred dollars of flood insurance (which I don't have by the way), would cover me.
MORE IMPORTANTLY, the land that my house sits on would most likely still be here. I wouldn't have to come up with an additional $2000 per linear foot (as we did for the retaining wall and sand at the beach) to basically restore and stabilize the land so that the house could be repaired. By the way, that $2000/foot amount in Florida was totally UNINSURABLE in case some of you didn't know....completely out of pocket.
Bottom line, no disclosure was necessary for my river property in my opinion.
re: Mountain top
Hmmm...
Isn't there some passage in the bible about better to build on rock than sand? I have no idea why I said that. Are you implying landslides should be disclosed? Never mind.
Again, I was just more or less following Bobby J's lead about "disclosure" to his clients.
Point is, you can't disclose something if you don't know there's a problem.
Who knew we'd have TEN times the erosion from Dennis than we did from Ivan using Opal as a baseline?
Let me simply summarize this "disclosure" stuff here...
1. I asked BobbyJ if he had any problem with selling (and profitting from) gulf front property.
2. BobbyJ responded by saying if he were to sell a gulf front property, disclosure was very important...that the buyer should know what they're getting in to.
3. I mentioned that the erosion issue was not "disclosed" to me when I bought my gulf front property.
4. JR says he can't believe that I didn't research it or know. He implies that basically unless one is "ignorant enough" one should have known.
Here's the result... IF I should have known about the erosion problem (remember... about 10 times greater from just one storm!),
then it would be reasonable for the previous owner to have known it was a real possibility as well (also the real estate "professionals" involved). If they did know, then they certainly should have (at least ethically) disclosed that "likelyhood" especially in hindsight.
I'm not looking for any stinkin' disclosure. JR is right. I do my own research and sure as hell wouldn't
totally depend on a so-called "home inspector" or a disclosure statement.
I hope I've more than adequately proved my point that I WAS TOTALLY UNAWARE of the erosional devastation that could occur from just one
relatively weak hurricane. I don't think I was the only one.
Was "I" aware of erosion in general? Of course "I" was!! I'm speaking for me. I can't speak for other gulf front owners as far as what they actually knew. One of the reasons I purchased our property was because we do have room to "retreat". Problem is, we would have gotten VERY LITTLE money from the insurance because the building was only partially damaged. Even if we did retreat, we're only one building. It was much cheaper to build the retaining wall and repair the building damage while minimizing "down-time". Retreat is still a possibility but not now.
Should we start a disclosure thread?
SJ, all of this now leads me to ask you a serious multiple choice question.
If you were to sell a gulf front property that has been fully "restored" with no evidence of erosion, would you fully disclose to the buyer that the bluff eroded 20 feet from just one hurricane while you were standing in front of the owner?
1. yes
2. no
3. maybe:scratch:
4. none of your business:nono1:
5. depends on your definition of "fully" and "fully"