• @brucethemoose
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    2 months ago

    If its our area (Flordia coast)… that’s not a problem.

    Buyers don’t care. They don’t know squat about flooding or hurricanes, they just come in from out of state and get dazzled by the realtor and the weather and everything and buy.

    Our housing market was so crazy houses were being auctioned left and right. Market value just keeps going up, even on the coast.

    TL;DR if the area is superficially attractive enough, home buyers are idiots. I realize this is probably not the case in Georgia mountains, but it his here, and its enabling a vicious cycle where builders keep building homes in obvious flood zones, where they absolutely shouldn’t.

    • @[email protected]
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      132 months ago

      That doesn’t fix the problem, it just changes who has the problem. Though I’ll admit that idiots buying bad stuff from other idiots in a cycle until eventually one idiot gets their life totally ruined feels a little on the nose.

    • @ChexMax
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      72 months ago

      Not exactly. My coworker has been trying to sell his waterfront home for over a year. He keeps having to rehab it after flooding from storms and then right back on the market. No luck. Starting October 13th or something you have to start disclosing floods when selling, also.

    • @[email protected]
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      52 months ago

      I was talking to some friends last weekend, and one of them said that they had previously owned a house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I said, “I love the Outer Banks, love visiting it, but I would never buy real estate there.” He said, “Yeah, it took a couple years for us to figure that out.”

      Of course, the islands are basically giant sandbars, and there’s the sea level rise issue. But I hadn’t considered that the environment is just that much harder on houses - roofs need to be replaced more often, wood rots more quickly, and so on - and that’s not even including a hurricane coming through. When the kind kicks up, which happens pretty regularly there, the house is getting sandblasted. The maintenance costs are much higher compared to an inland house, and I assume insurance is much higher, and so on.

      They rented it out to vacationers to help offset that cost, but they found that they weren’t breaking even - they have to charge competitive rates to get customers, but those rates weren’t covering all of the major upcoming expenses.

      But, there’s still a market for houses there. I imagine the recent images in the news of houses collapsing into the water have to be having an effect, but the bottom doesn’t seem to be falling out like you’d think.

      • @brucethemoose
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        2 months ago

        No kidding, even inland salt is a menace. That + sand destroys stuff outside.

        Florida has the added bonus of being a swampy jungle, which you don’t really understand until you try to live there. Your landscaping, weeds, anything that grows, grows like crazy. Your pets will get all sorts of infections and parasites from the ground, even with all the pesticide they spray through sheer necessity. Mosquitos are even bigger than in Texas, and they never leave. And I saw a big alligator tear up our neighbor’s porch trying to run/hide from us, in a very suburban area.