I was involved in a recent transaction on a home that has septic. The city where the home is located is trying to switch all homes in the city to sewer and is doing it in phases. The reason that the city is doing that has something to do with the soil conditions and how septic was shown to start contaminating the water table – some sort of lawsuit or some such backed them into it.
Here is where it gets interesting. While doing due diligence on the septic system at this home, we found out it was not operating properly. The city, since it is trying to move homes to sewer, has a rule that if a septic repair requires leach line replacement then you can’t repair it, you have to switch to sewer.
Not only that but if you are the first person on your street to require sewer, you have to pay for the ENTIRE sewer line back to the main trunk on a main road. Gulp! The calculation for this house was $50K to do that. Then as other neighbors were forced into sewer, they would reimburse you a certain percentage but that money wouldn’t come back to you for years probably. (I have no idea why the city doesn’t use improvement districts)
Luckily the septic repair ended up being cheap, but you can see how that could have ended up to being a huge headache.
Also factor in that there are restrictions on what you can do over or around the leach lines (trees, patios, etc)…you may end up with a large grass area you can’t do anything else with.
Would I shy away from septic? Hell yes! I would have to really, really like the house to buy one with septic. It would probably affect how much I was willing to pay.
