Considered a property with an A FEMA flood rating. It sold to someone else, was I right to let it go?
My area has a housing shortage and it's been very hard to find something within my budget. I've been looking for three years. Recently, market has been dropping at the high end, but things in my price range still go pretty quickly. In any case, I saw a house that checked most of my boxes and was ready to put in an offer- but it's 'extreme' flood risk made me hesitate. The house is on a forested sloping small lot with a mountain stream/runoff area down the hill. Zooming in on the FEMA map, most of the lot was X risk (including where the house sat), but part of the lot was in the A zone. The owners had lived in the house for 25 years and said it had never flooded. They had no elevation certificate and seemed clueless that their house was in a flood zone. The broker told me flood insurance was mandatory, but that the risk could possibly be recalculated if I could prove the house was elevated enough from the flood area. This would cost in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars and require an engineer.
Additionally, the house was on a shared well in an area where wells have been drying up. I've heard some horror stories about people in the area having to abandon houses when they lost water and couldn't afford the 30k+ to dig a new well. In any case, it all seemed a bit too much and I figured it would be hard to sell the house with climate change making floods more likely, etc. Did I make the right decision? I've been feeling pretty depressed the past few days because there was a lot to like about the house and it didn't seem like they had a problem selling after all (though it's under contract not sold, yet).
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/RealEstate/comments/1lqjkia/considered_a_property_with_an_a_fema_flood_rating/
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