What is Natural Hazard Disclosure in Real Estate?
The NHD or “natural hazard disclosure” report statement is a downloadable PDF or hard copy form/booklet provided by real estate NHD companies. The natural hazard zone disclosure report is civil code law and means every property sale in the state of California is required to have a new NHD provided to the buyer in the transaction of a commercial building or residential home purchase.
There are discrepancies in the amount and types of information provided on the NHD report. Obviously if you are buying a house in California, Nevada or Arizona you would like to have as much property information as you can. If the seller or sellers agent gives you a “low cost” NHD report you might not learn some important criteria about the homes safety or even information to leverage in the negotiating!
And basically that is the issue at stake when the seller (who is responsible in providing the NHD) decides or is erroneously direct to buy a low cost cheap NHD report. The home seller may be totally unaware of the issue with the natural hazard zoning statement as it is often the realtor, escrow company or transaction coordinator making the call on buying the disclosure report. In essence, this is saving about $29 to potentially face a seller disclosure lawsuit or leave the home buyer “unaware of the natural hazard issues”
What undisclosed property information are we talking about?
Well you may get the basic information about whether your property is on, or near an earthquake fault line. However, you may get the full disclosure and not know the vicinity of an industrial area or commercial factory affecting the air quality. You may find that when you move into a new house you cannot build any additions you had planned due to “natural habitat zoning” or local historic municipality issues. Other areas of concern to new and first time home buyers are vicinity to former meth labs, chemical spills, toxic soil, naturally occurring asbestos, radon exposure, vicinity to sex offenders, Meagan’s law, the list goes on.
For general information’s sake a NHD report by the disclosure industry founder Property ID is about 40 pages of information and backed by a $20 million insurance policy. A cheaper low cost NHD disclosure report backed by nothing may only have 2-3 pages, what critical property information to the buyer is missing???