City Living: You need stout legs and good surveillance skills to assess an area you want to buy in, says Edel Morgan - but does it have to be like this?
In this country finding out about an area you are considering buying into usually requires a combination of leg work, good phone skills and a bit of light espionage. Knocking on people's doors in the hope they won't give you a "rose-tinted" view of their locality is one approach. Other tactics include nocturnal surveillance visits to the area to check for anti-social behaviour or calling the gardaí and residents' groups to ask about crime rates.
While an estate agent may be able to fill you in on amenities and schools, they may well laugh you out of town if you ask them about the quality of the local air or its radon gas levels.
In the UK you can access all this information and more at the touch of a button. All you have to do is enter the post code of the property you are looking at into at www.homecheck.co.uk, and hey presto, it produces two reports. One focuses on the area, it's amenities, crime statistics, nearby schools, council tax rates, its demographics and the percentage of homeowners, social tenants and privately rented dwellings in the locality.
Another report on the local environment details the risk of flooding and subsidence in the area, radon gas and pollution levels and nearby landfill and waste processing sites. The site is one of a number of internet services by Sitescope Limited, a provider of property and environmental risk information to lawyers, banks, surveyors, insurance companies, engineers and other property professionals. Sitescope's database is built from information supplied from a long list of agencies including the Ordnance Survey, environmental agencies and the British Geological Survey (BGS).
There are an estimated 400,000 old industrial sites and 275,000 abandoned rubbish tips in the UK, 46,000 of which are believed to be releasing pollutants into the local environment. The website gives the example of the hapless Brian Doy who bought a four bedroom detached house in Copford, Essex, unaware that it had been built on an old landfill which later had other industrial uses, including a scrapyard.
A year after he bought the house, the council informed residents on the estate that landfill gas had been detected in the area. A survey was undertaken by consultants to the council who said the problem was particularly bad in the area of the old tip near Mr Doy's house. Mr Doy and other residents' homes were subsequently devalued by the district valuer, dropping from the £160,000-£320,000 price bracket to £88,000-£120,000. Mr Doy later tried to sell his house but, unsurprisingly, nobody would buy it.
homecheck also appears on a number of property websites in the UK and allows prospective buyers to assess an area before they decide to view a property. Instead of talking an area up to unrealistic levels, the hard facts are presented to the consumer.
There isn't the same easy public access to environmental information in Ireland and pursuing it can be a time consuming business. We spend €250-€400 on structural surveys to ensure the property we are buying is sound but often take little time to find out about its environs, possibly because we're too busy. To find out even a fraction of the information included in the homecheck reports would involve visiting the local authority to find out if the property is on a flood plain or near a landfill site, contacting local agencies for crime statistics and other local information, talking to the Environmental Protection Agency, and local people.
According to an An Taisce report, the mean time between flooding incidents is now as little as three years for many areas. "Intervals between floods will continue to reduce due to adverse climatic change, the replacement of nature's water storage media (e.g, bogs, spongy ground) with development, rising sea levels and the reduction in river flood plains," says the report. There is also an increasing incidence of coastal flooding and Ireland's low-gradient rivers, notably the Shannon, can flood at any time of the year and are susceptible to man-made development, which "would increase the chances of flooding . . . Planning authorities are failing to prosecute unauthorised development, such as landfill in flood plains; where they do (less than 2 per cent of planning application numbers), convictions are the result in only one in five cases (2001 data)" says the report.
Over 90,000 Irish houses are now predicted to have dangerously high levels of radon, a radioactive gas which is known to cause lung cancer. The test for radon involves placing two small radon sensitive detectors in a house for three months. At the end of this period, the detectors are sent to the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland (RPII). Since July 1998, every new house is required to incorporate some degree of radon preventive measures at the time of construction in accordance with revised Building Regulations. The Environmental Protection Agency's air monitoring data website, www.epa.ie/air/monitoring, allows the public to access data from 13 monitoring stations across Ireland. You can contact the EPA with any air quality queries.
