Lead inspections disclosure rules during purchase...

[chai-ride.livejournal.com]

I thought I would run this by the community, and perhaps a real estate agent or lawyer will have some background to share. We recently had an offer accepted on a condo near Porter, and after the offer was accepted, while checking online, discovered that the unit had previous lead paint inspections that found violations, apparently during the previous owner's watch.

The current sellers and their agent had specifically indicated there were no disclosures. Our understanding is that according to the law they had to disclose to us the results of the lead tests. It seems that either the previous owner failed to disclose the results to them (and they didn't try hard to find the public record on their building), or they knew about the tests but failed to disclose them to us; in either case, it seems someone was breaking the rules.

We have decided not to purchase the condo, but wonder if there is something we can do to help ensure that such lead paint violations are disclosed.

Any experiences with this would be of interest.

Comments

[clevernonsense.livejournal.com]

What are "lead paint violations"? Most houses in this region have lead paint in them, it's not a violation it's just a fact. The only restriction is when trying to have young children living there.

I am not positive at all, but I think most disclosures are voluntary, so unless they specifically said the place had be deleaded I don't know if they did anything illegal.

[chai-ride.livejournal.com]

I was more curious about how the disclosure rules are supposed to work. Our understanding was this kind of thing was supposed to be disclosed.

We found the inspections logged at: http://webapps.ehs.state.ma.us/Leadsafehomes/default.aspx

And the report indicated:
Violations Found, At the time of inspection there were lead hazard found on the property....
(and yes, it seems this applies mainly to when children <6 live there)

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

A "violation" is when a formal inspection has been done and lead has been found. It's true that you don't *have* to do anything about it unless there is a young child living there, but you do have to disclose the lead status if you know it when selling the house. That's why most people work hard to never know the lead status of their properties. ;-)

[clevernonsense.livejournal.com]

good to know :)

maybe the owner ate a lot of paint chips and the brain damage made them forget about the violation?

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

Further to my comment, here is a link to the form that has to be completed by the seller with every offer to purchase (http://www.buyerschoicerealty.com/buyerbroker/assets/frames/body_lead_paint_form.html). The law stipulates that the seller must disclose any information they have about lead in the property.

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

You already got out of buying this property, thankfully, so I'm not sure how much more you can do to the sellers for lying on the lead disclosure form. Presumably there are penalties defined under the law that requires that form, though.

I would contact the real estate agent's firm and the Mass Realtors Association (http://marealtor.com/content/) (if the agent is a member) to express concern that the agent may have broken the law by knowing about lead in the home and not telling you.

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, here's more about the penalties: "Sellers and real estate agents who do not meet these requirements can face a civil penalty of up to $1,000 under state law; a civil penalty of up to $10,000 and possible criminal sanctions under federal law, as well as liability for resulting damages. In addition, a real estate agent who fails to meet these requirements may be liable under the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Act."

Sadly, they can probably say that the previous owner who got the lead inspection done didn't tell *them*, which is why they didn't tell *you*, regardless of whether that's true or not, and as civil penalties, you'd have to sue them, I think.

[masswich.livejournal.com]

Aye, there's the rub. That's one reason why people use realtors- to keep information about their unit at arms length from buyers. You can't lie to a buyer directly but you can not tell your realtor something, and it then becomes very hard to trace where the information got dropped.

Of course, there are other reasons to hire realtors too, many of them good reasons.

[ron_newman]

Did you have to pay a penalty for not following through with a purchase after having your offer accepted?

[chai-ride.livejournal.com]

No penalties (though still waiting for our deposit that accompanied our offer to be returned). The home inspection revealed enough other serious issues that the sellers agreed we could cancel our offer before the P&S.

[masswich.livejournal.com]

I think this is just reiterating what has already been said here, but any actual lead inspection - whether by the state or a private lead inspector - that results in an official report must be disclosed. If there is no actual report - just a visual inspection or something less official - I think a seller can get away with the "not aware of any lead hazards" comment.

The official reports are all done on the same state-designed form and are actually fairly helpful in understanding your situation. We had one that the seller had done on our house, and we were able to use it to get quotes on remediation, which could then inform the price we were willing to pay for the house.

ANY oldish house in MA

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

has lead... For the simple reason that they all have layers of paint that contain lead. They may have been painted over multiple times with lead-free paint but it's still there...

Re: ANY oldish house in MA

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

The thousands of dollars that we, and some of our friends, have spent deleading our properties beg to differ. They probably all started with lead, and lead remediation can involve painting over them (with a special encapsulating paint; J. Random Lead-free Paint isn't enough), but it can also involve outright removal (e.g. in our kitchen, where we stripped everything on one wall including the plaster and put up new drywall).

Re: ANY oldish house in MA

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

Good luck recouping those thousands...

Re: ANY oldish house in MA

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

The point isn't to recoup them; the point is to end up with my daughter (now 3, in utero when we bought the house) not having lead poisoning. So far so good on that.

I mean, sure, we will *also* be able to disclose that the house is known-abated when someday we sell, and if we'd been more on the ball we could've gotten some government aid on the deleading, but that isn't actually the point.

Re: ANY oldish house in MA

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

If you have an in utero daughter, then it was a wise move.

[emcicle.livejournal.com]

when we bought our condo 10 years ago, i asked about lead paint. The owners told us "not as far as we know", and also, they had two children under the age of 5 and "they had never had a positive lead test for school/daycare". Having read more about it, i agree with the above posters. I don't plan to have a lead test done on the place because I don't want to have to disclose to anyone that it does have lead paint (but it probably does). I have two small children, and neither of them have had a positive lead test either.

it sucks that it is so incredibly expensive to delead

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

it sucks that it is so incredibly expensive to delead

There are grants and loan programs to help with the cost, depending on your income. Also, it can be cheaper to encapsulate (cover the lead paint with special encapsulating paint) than strip.

You may be surprised to find out how *little* of your house has lead paint. When I had mine tested, it was just the trim in the living room and the walls in the kitchen.

[emcicle.livejournal.com]

i've looked into the grant programs, we don't qualify (or didn't when we had 1 kid, with 2 we might, i'll check again)...

as noted below, i'm afraid of finding out and it being everywhere. even 7K is more than we can really afford right now.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's not a small amount regardless :(. Just wanted to make sure you knew it wasn't always $25K or $50K or whatever, in case those were the kinds of numbers you were worried about.

So, the ancapsulating paint

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

will NEVER crack or chip? Even 10 years later? Hard to believe.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I agree with mzrowan -- costs vary a lot depending on how much lead you have and how you remediate it. We also were pretty much living-room-trim, kitchen-walls and we mostly encapsulated (except for the kitchen wall mentioned above, which was so ugly that removing it was the better part of valor anyway). We came in around $7K -- which, I mean, is not cheap or anything, but was substantially less than we had feared based on others' experiences.

Of course you never know until you test, and if you do test you may find that everything is coated in lead, and then you're hosed, so as long as your kids aren't showing up positive for lead I totally get where you're coming from.

[emcicle.livejournal.com]

yeah, can't really afford to get hosed, and even $7K is out of our price range...

If you don't have young kids...

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

Don't waste your money... Besides, I don't believe the encapsulating solution lasts indefinitely.

[chai-ride.livejournal.com]

Thanks for all the comments.

I talked with health and human services who run the web site with the report I found, and they were not surprised the disclosure rules can be gotten around. As was mentioned above, it seems that while there is a law to encourage disclosure of inspections, and even though clearly either the previous or current owners didn't comply, that in practice it is not easy to do something about it. There is a $10k civil penalty, but you would have to sue to pursue that.

This wasn't a make or break issue for us, but it would have been nice to know beforehand, and we might not have gone forward with the inspection, etc.

I was also a little surprised our buyers agent didn't at least point us to this resource... For other buyers, it's an easy thing to check here: http://webapps.ehs.state.ma.us/Leadsafehomes/default.aspx