California Real Estate Transactions Require a Natural Hazard Disclosure Statement
When starting the California real estate transaction process there’s a lot of documentation required by each party involved. One of the most important documents a home seller must provide is the Natural Hazard Disclosure, also referred to as the NHD report. Without this essential piece of paperwork paid for by the home seller, a California real estate transaction will likely never take place.
If you’re wondering why it’s an important part of the transaction process, you’re going to want to continue reading!
Selling a House in California
It’s an exciting time when you decide to sell your current house to either grow into a larger one, or downsize to something smaller, or maybe it’s just a change of scenery behind the decision to move up and out. However, when selling, there’s one extremely important piece of information you’ll have to provide to a potential buyer: the Natural Hazard Disclosure report.
If you haven’t bought or sold a home since the early 1990s, this report might not be a familiar one. But it’s now essential in order to protect those involved in a real estate transaction, as it informs a buyer of specific hazardous areas or zones the house may or may not be located in.
Think of it as informed consent - once the seller informs the buyer of the hazards through this report, it protects the seller from future financial burdens and lets the buyer know what they’re getting themselves into and there’s no chance of claiming “we didn’t know”. Don’t worry this is a third party report that you will order so you don’t need to know any specifics.
So what does the report reveal about a house? Let’s find out.
Essential NHD Report for the California Home Buying Process
California homes are often located in some unique zones, which may not have been the case when the house was originally built, but the world and environment change! In order to protect home buyers and sellers, California implemented the Natural Hazard Disclosure Act of 1998, making it mandatory for all real estate transactions to include a Natural Hazard Disclosure report that informs home owners and sellers if a house falls into the following categories:
Could be affected by severe fires or wildfires
Sits on an earthquake fault line
Located in a seismic hazard zone
At risk for flooding
Might suffer from damage due to a dam failure
Along with the mandatory items above, optional extras can be added to the report such as tax information, radon gas exposure, and more. These reports are usually 50 pages or more and provide a plethora of information that can often be overwhelming for a home buyer to wade through. Working with a real estate agent that has a trusted real estate TC using an NHD company like American Home Shield Natural Hazard Disclosure, can help ease much of the anxiety and stress of trying to understand the supplied reports.
California is Taking Care of Homeowners with Mandatory NHD Reports
As much as required paperwork can overwhelm home buyers and sellers in California, the various forms and reports truly do help both the sellers and buyers in California real estate transactions. A Natural Hazard Disclosure report protects not just a home buyer from buying a house without full knowledge of the catastrophic events it might suffer in the future, but also the seller from future lawsuits for selling a potentially dangerous home. Work with real estate agents that have trusted real estate TCs with solid teams of professionals.
