Inspect the Sewer Line, Every Time

My kids joke that I’m obsessed with sewer lines. So on a recent vacation, I threatened to take them to the Paris Sewer Museum (yes, it exists) instead of the Louvre.

Why this obsession? Because I recommend a camera scope of the sewer line as a standard inspection for every buyer I represent.  And about 70% of the time the scope reveals some sort of problem, from minor root intrusion to major breaks.

If you think this is a gross subject for a blog, then you should see my sewer line DVD collection. Glamorous, no. Important, yes. 

In Boulder, most of the older lines are clay, which is susceptible to cracking, settling, and root intrusions. Even newer PVC lines can have low spots or "bellies" that cause slow drains or backups. Sellers are often blissfully unaware of any issues with their home’s waste line, until a buyer scopes it.

Repairing or replacing a pipe that is 6 to 15 feet underground is expensive, running anywhere from $2,500 to $25,000. Excavation is most often required, which can destroy landscaping and be impossible if the ground is frozen. 

When buyers discover a problem during their inspection period, they can cancel the contract and get their earnest money returned, negotiate a price reduction or closing credit, or ask the seller to complete a repair prior to closing. The cost to hire a plumber or inspector to run a camera down the line is $100 - $200. I’d say that’s a good investment.

Most technicians will also “locate” the line by going outside with a detector that can find the camera through the ground and then marking the spot on the surface with chalk or tape.  The detector can also reveal how deep underground the line runs. It can tell a buyer if, for example, the sewer line passes through a neighbor’s property.

On a recent transaction, the buyer discovered exactly that. To make matters worse, the neighbor’s sewer line then tied into the line before it met the City main in the alley. The triple whammy was that the line appeared to run UNDER the neighbor’s house. The bad news kept coming: without a City main in the street out front, the house was landlocked and couldn't tie into the City main without running through a neighbor's land.

Unfortunately, I was representing the seller who had been blissfully unaware of all these facts. She had bought the home a decade prior, before camera scopes had become popular with buyers.

With no legal easement and no shared sewer line maintenance agreement with the neighbor in place, this discovery scared the buyer away. After six weeks of fruitless negotiations with the neighbors and spending over $1,500 in legal fees, my client finally sold her home to a different buyer for $31,000 less than the original buyer had offered. Another expensive lesson learned.

Now I know way more than a normal person should, not only about sewer lines in general, but also about sewer lines that serve more than one house. Although it is a violation of current building code, shared sewer lines are fairly common in older parts of Boulder, along with Lafayette, and Longmont, where large, multi-building estates were later subdivided into smaller parcels. They are more or less “grandfathered” in by Boulder’s code unless there is a way to tie in directly to a City main line.  So, they’re not really a problem … until there’s a problem.

Ideally, there will be a recorded maintenance agreement between the owners of all the homes that are tied into the common sewer line answering these questions: What can and can’t be flushed down the toilet? What happens if a backup occurs? Who pays for the repair and how are the costs split? What if the line needs replacing – will the neighbors separate their lines? If a backup occurs in one house do all the owners share cleanup costs?

After this listing sold, I said I never wanted to utter the phrase "shared sewer line" again, yet here I am writing a blog about it. I figured that I might as well share what I learned about shared sewer lines.