KGCI: Real Estate on Air - What You Need to Know About Exterior Grading

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

And welcome to another edition of the nerdy agent podcast, Business Tip of the Week. It's the business tip of the week. I feel like my voice is getting a lot better each time I do that. It's definitely getting higher. Okay. I don't know if that's necessarily better. This week, and keeping with the theme of house-related topics, this week we're going to talk about water mitigation and how you can stop it from getting into the basement because you'll have past clients that will get water after they move in or you'll do an inspection. it'll be previous water damage.

So let's say your past client moves into the house. Two weeks later, the snow melts, water gets in their basement. They're freaking out, obviously. They reach out to you, AJ. What are you saying that they can do to mitigate this in the future? First off, I always tell my clients, when I'm showering, I am so thankful for water. And when I'm boiling it, I'm also thankful for it. And when I'm drinking it out of my filtered thing in my fridge.

I'm very thankful for it. Not when it's in the basement. You really only want water in the situations where, you actually need it and want it, right? So keeping water away from your house is one of the most important things you can do as a homeowner. And most homeowners fail miserably at this. So if it does get into the house, the first thing you do is troubleshoot why it's getting into your house. A lot of times people leave their gutters full of leaves in the fall. They don't blow them out. And the snow melts off their roof and it drips right over the edge of the gutters rather than going in them.

Or their gutters are frozen. Or they have really bad grade on the outside. of their house and they're not managing. What is great on the outside of the house mean? So your your house should be up almost on like a little hill, if you will. So you want to make sure that your soil is packed in and running high to low pitched like a plumbing drain would be away from your house. Now to do an extra layer of safety, some people put plastic down underneath that on that pitch. So it runs through, runs along a plastic, goes away from the house. But gutters are really your first line of defense against this. I always say houses that are on flat lots. So first ring suburbs, Minneapolis, St. Paul here locally should not get water unless everybody else is getting water.

If you're the only one getting water in your neighborhood and you're on a flat lot, you're doing something wrong. Now there are situations where water's running off of a hill and you've got to, you know, manage it a little bit more in your yard. But the first thing I would do is troubleshoot that. And the first thing I tell every homeowner, especially first time buyers to do, on the first rain, people are like, you're crazy when you say this, on the first rain, go outside and check where the water's going. Can we just make sure we make it known? Being outside in the rain is the best. It's the greatest. If you don't like standing outside in the rain, that's a different topic. You can turn this podcast off right now. Yeah. Yeah. Man. As kids, you know, we used to do. I still run around the rain.

We used to play wiffle ball every time when it would pour rain. It was the greatest. But I do it at my house often, to be honest, I go out there and I go, oh, wow, you know, that connection to that gutter downspout is not fully on there. The screw came loose or whatever happened. And the water's dripping out the side. Well, when it drips out the side of your gutter downspout right next to the corner of your foundation and on one of these heavy rainstorms, you have water in your basement and you throw your hands up like what's going on, it's probably because you're dumping water right

next to your house. A lot of people think that concrete is going to keep water away because you walk on a concrete pad and you're like, oh, this isn't going to get filled up with water. Little do they know that everything that goes into concrete is extremely porous. So your concrete block is not safe from water going through it, everybody, just so you know. Your concrete floor, same thing. Also not safe from water going through it. So you want to make sure the water is moving out and around your house.

If you have a walkout lot, it's extremely easy to do. You just let it run down the hill naturally with gravity and it will go away from your house. So again, to just boil this down to a couple things, gutters, downspouts and downspout extenders or bearing your downspouts is the first thing you can do. Second thing is fixing your grade. Keeping them clean, fixing your grade. Third thing for bonuses is put a lot of plants in your landscaping. People think that's just for looks.

But native plants, lilies and Hasta here in Minnesota, soak up a ton of water because they drink water. to grow and to survive. So the more trees you have, the more plants you have in like around the outside of your house, the better off you're going to do with water management. The last fun tip I'm going to leave you with is every time I have a buyer purchase a house in the winter. So they're closing in the winter. There's snow on the ground.

I tell them before the first thaw, you can, you can let it ride and see what happens. But if you want to make sure that you're not going to have water the first thaw because you've never lived here, you have no idea. You could just go around your house and you could shovel two feet. And you're going to give yourself a far greater chance to not have water in your basement because that's that stuff melting as a great chance of coming in. Bingo.