Published June 2002

When buying a home,
check out nearby zoning

A recent example of a neighborhood up in arms about growth pressures is perhaps one good way to illustrate how important doing your due diligence can be before you buy a home.

The Herald reported in its Sunday, April 21, edition about some members of the Silver Firs neighborhood in south Everett publicly objecting to the development of a Safeway grocery store in an adjacent vacant lot.

The gentleman leading the charge for Silver Firs provides several cogent arguments against the grocery store. But he missed one important fact: The property in question had been zoned for commercial uses since 1968. The risk that commercial property might be built there should have been known to everyone who bought in Silver Firs. Most of those homes were built after 1968.

Several years ago, I was chairman of a municipal oversight board that heard, essentially, neighbors arguing against what their neighbors wanted to do with their property and made recommendations to city staff based on these hearings.

From this platform, I saw numerous similar examples of the Silver Firs episode played out before me. The experience opened my eyes to how easily many of these conflicts among neighbors could have been avoided if the homeowners just did more homework on their neighborhood before they bought.

In contrast to most residential homebuyers, commercial property buyers must know the direction a neighborhood will take for the long-term viability of their tenants and, consequently, their investment. Commercial property buyers have been doing this for years as a normal course of the due diligence process.

Homebuyers might take a page from commercial property buyers’ play books in this regard. Zoning and other relevant information about property uses are available through county records. Most of this information is publicly available for a reason.

Too often, homebuyers are interested in lot lines and clean title on their particular property and fail to look beyond to the broader neighborhood trends and allowed uses. Just because the vacant, commercially zoned lot next door isn’t a grocery store today doesn’t mean the market will remain that way forever.

Residential real estate agents can be a big help here if you ask them. Go beyond the walls of the home. If part of buying a home is buying into a neighborhood, then you’d better know what your neighbors have the right to do before you buy. Objecting to a legitimate use after you buy is too late in many cases.

Tom Hoban is CEO of Everett-based Coast Real Estate Services, a property management and real estate advisory company. He can be reached at 425-339-3638 or send e-mail to tomhoban@coastmgt.com.

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