Buying a Home

What Age Home Should I Look For If I Want a Mold-Safe Home?

It's a fair question, and I hear it often. It's also not an easy one, because we're working in shades of gray rather than black and white. I'll give you my answer, but with a handful of caveats.

Why social media won't give you the answer

If you post this question online, you'll go a little crazy trying to make sense of the replies. One person will say, "My house was built in 1994 and it made me and my son very sick, so avoid homes built in the 90s." Another will say, "My family got sick in a new build, so don't buy new."

Those experiences are real, and I'm not discounting them. But it's easy to take one family's story and stretch it across every home, and that doesn't hold up. Please be careful about extrapolating one experience to the rest of the housing market.

The "breathing house" debate

Another point that comes up constantly is building practices. You've probably heard it a million times: older homes were built to "breathe," and newer homes are built tight for energy efficiency.

In my experience, when you follow either of those rabbit holes, neither scenario turns out to be perfect. What matters more is this: the longer a building has been standing, the more time there has been for water events to happen. It has also had more occupants, and more chances for something to go wrong and not be addressed correctly. That's the relevant point.

None of that means a young home is in the clear. I've seen brand-new homes with catastrophic roof leaks, and even homes where the builder did not store his material correctly and used moldy wood in the build. Anything can happen at any time, which is why awareness and prevention matter so much.

An older home that breathes well doesn't erase the dishwasher leak from ten years ago, the washing machine leak from two years before that, the toilet leak from five years back, or the basement that flooded one time in 1982. Those are two separate things, and one doesn't offset the other.

The same goes for new construction, which is not immune to construction defects. I see them often. A house built ten years ago isn't automatically the happy medium either, unless you're focused on something like VOCs, which is a different topic altogether.

So what matters is the history of the particular home and what has or hasn't happened there. Age doesn't dictate that. The one rule of thumb I'll offer is that the older the home, the more opportunity there has been for things to happen.

So how do you narrow down your options?

Since age isn't a great deciding factor, what do you do? I wish I could point to one test or one thing to look for. There isn't one. There's no checklist of "find a home with A through D and avoid E, F, and G." Every property is unique. Here's what I recommend instead:

• Educate yourself. Learn building science, and what to look for as it relates to water damage and mold.
• Do your own walkthrough. Look at as much as you can yourself.
• Bring in the best professionals you can find. That could be a home inspector who holds a mold certification, a licensed mold inspector, and a Conscious Healthy Home Realtor.
• Gather data points. The more you collect, the clearer the picture becomes.

Love the house, and keep a cushion

The most important advice I can give is to make sure you love the home. Choose somewhere you want to live and are willing to invest in, emotionally and financially. If something does turn up, you'll want to fix it because you want to stay there, and that makes the expense feel far less painful.

A red flag in a clean report

Sometimes I hear, "We had the home inspection and they didn't find anything." Honestly, that's a bit of a red flag for me. Nothing? Every home will eventually have something: a window or flashing that gives way, a plumbing leak, a small failure somewhere. That shouldn't scare us. We just need to be prepared.

Reframe the goal

People want a black-and-white answer to a very gray question, and I truly wish I could give you one. The better move is to reframe what you're trying to do. Put together every tool and piece of information you can.

Some people find it stressful to hear that there's no perfect home. I find it freeing. You're not on a quest for a unicorn. You're building a toolkit and making an informed decision.