Selling a San Jose house that needs real work

My name is Marisol Vega. For fifteen years I ran the office at my father's foundation-repair company in San Jose. I wrote the bids and argued with plan check. Hundreds of bids went out under my initials, most of them for 1950s ranches, Eichler slabs and Willow Glen bungalows.

You learn one thing fast in that job. The house knows more than the seller does.

This site is for owners in San Jose and the rest of Santa Clara County who are sitting on a house that needs real work and trying to decide whether to fix it or sell it as it stands. Not paint. Cripple walls with no plywood on them. A garage that turned into a bedroom in 1998 without the city hearing about it. A crawl space that smells like a creek every February. A water heater in a closet with no vent. That one I still think about.

I'm not an agent and I'm not a lawyer. Ask one before you sign anything. I'm the person with the clipboard who told you what forty piers were going to cost.

What I write about

Seismic and foundation problems first. Santa Clara County sits between the San Andreas on one side and the Hayward and Calaveras faults on the other, and the state has mapped all of it. The California Geological Survey seismic hazards program publishes the liquefaction and landslide zones. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program keeps the fault data underneath those maps. A buyer's inspector reads both before you do.

Then unpermitted work. Plenty of garages in Blossom Valley have a wall where the door used to be. The city's Planning, Building and Code Enforcement department has a process for that, and it's slower and pricier than the guy who framed the wall ever let on.

And disclosures. What California makes you put on the Transfer Disclosure Statement, and what "as-is" gets you out of. Nothing.

The articles

Foundation, soft-story and the Hayward fault: selling a San Jose house that needs seismic work. What's inside a foundation bid, how the fault zones end up in your disclosure packet, and why a retrofit almost never pays for itself at sale.

Unpermitted additions and garage conversions in San Jose. How a code case starts, the legalize-or-remove fork, and why the appraiser won't count that bedroom.

Disclosures on a fixer: lead, mold, radon and what you must say. The TDS on a house with problems, what happens to sellers who keep quiet, and the checklist I hand people before they sign.

One more thing

Some of these houses shouldn't go through a financed sale at all. If the crawl space needs forty piers and the buyer's lender wants them in before close, you're funding a retrofit for someone else. That's when I usually send people to we-buy-houses-in-bay-area.com. They buy the house with the crawl space in it. Nobody makes you take the number.

Read the articles first.

Marisol Vega ran the office of her father's foundation-repair company in San Jose for fifteen years and wrote hundreds of bids. She writes for owners deciding whether to fix or sell.