To help consumers understand the advantages of buying a new home, U.S. News recently compiled a list of nine reasons to choose a new home over a resale.
1. Customization: Many homebuilders allow buyers to help design the property, which helps create a living space tailored to the consumer’s tastes. New-home buyers, for example, may decide where their bathroom might go, choose their favorite flooring or pick the exterior paint color. Buyers moving into a new-home community can often even pick the homsite they like best.
2. Building envelope: Building codes have mandated higher energy-efficiency standards since they began to address the issue in the late 1970s. The most recent International Energy Conservation Code came out in 2009 and required about 17% more efficiency than three years earlier.
3. Green appliances: The more energy-efficient mechanics of the house also help reduce utility bills for new-home buyers. New homes often include green systems and appliances — such as high-efficiency stoves, refrigerators, washing machines, water heaters, furnaces or air conditioning units — that homes built years ago might not.
4. Fewer repairs: The features of new homes should hold up better than those of existing homes, which may have experienced years of wear and tear.
5. Less maintenance: Today’s new homes are engineered specifically to minimize maintenance requirements, with materials such as composite products for a home’s exterior trim instead of wood, which could rot or need repainting.
6. Warranty: A new home is generally fully warrantied by the builder for a minimum of a year, and most of all the other components are warrantied for extended periods, so if your roof starts leaking or the heater breaks during the warranty period, your builder will pick up the tab for the repairs.
7. Fire safety: New homes often include fire-safety features that may not be in properties built years ago, such as fire retardant in carpeting and insulation. In addition, all new homes are required to include hard-wired smoke detectors. These devices can provide better protection than battery-operated smoke detectors, which can fail if their battery runs out.
8. Concessions: Buyers can often negotiate more concessions out of a homebuilding company than an individual seller. That’s because individual sellers often have an emotional attachment to their property that can blind them to its true value.
9. Financing: New-home buyers can take advantage of mortgage-financing perks sometimes available through their builder, or offered through financial institutions on new home purchases exclusively.
– Excerpts from an article by Luke Mullins of U.S. News & World Report
