Before you write an offer.
Fourteen things worth checking before you commit to a house in South King or Pierce County. Most of them cost nothing but an hour of your time.
I give this to my own clients. There's no form in front of it — take it and use it even if you never call me.
Go stand there
The most useful hour you'll spend, and the one almost nobody spends.
1. The intersection, twice
Stand at the junction you'd turn onto every single day. Once at 7:15 in the morning, once at 5 in the afternoon. A twenty-minute commute on a map is not a twenty-minute commute.
2. Friday at 9 p.m.
Come back. A street is a different street on a Friday night than on a Sunday afternoon when the open house was.
3. Walk the lot in the rain
Wait for a wet day and go look. You're watching for water sheeting across the yard, corners that stay saturated, and moss lines on fences and siding that tell you where water sits.
4. Measure the driveway grade
Steep driveways are a winter problem and an insurance problem, and they're invisible in photographs.
The house itself
5. Look for an oil tank fill pipe
On anything built before the mid-seventies. A buried tank is expensive and it's the sort of thing that surfaces late.
6. Sewer scope anything pre-1960
Original clay laterals fail. A scope costs a few hundred dollars and it has saved clients of mine many thousands.
7. Knob-and-tube and cloth wiring
Common in older Tacoma stock in particular. It affects what you can insure and what it costs.
8. Sewer or septic — confirm which
Don't assume. Septic changes your maintenance, your inspection, and sometimes your loan.
9. The systems' ages
Roof, furnace or heat pump, water heater, windows. Four numbers. If three of them are at end of life, that's a real number to put beside the purchase price.
The paperwork nobody reads
10. Confirm the school, by lookup
Not by mailing address, and not by what the listing says. Across every city I work in, district boundaries cut through neighborhoods and sometimes down the middle of a street. Use the district's own boundary tool.
11. City or unincorporated county?
Especially around Puyallup and South Hill. It changes your schools, your services, your taxes, and what you have to do to pull a permit. The county parcel viewer will tell you.
12. Pull the hazard maps
FEMA flood mapping in the Auburn and Kent valley. Lahar and evacuation route maps around Puyallup. Liquefaction, tsunami, and landslide mapping in Tacoma. Environmentally sensitive areas in Federal Way.
These maps exist, they're free, and they're public. Look at them yourself and draw your own conclusions — that's not a decision anyone should make for you.
13. Get the flood insurance quote early
Before your inspection contingency expires, not after. The premium is sometimes the thing that decides it.
14. Permit history
Finished basements, added bathrooms, and converted garages that were never permitted become your problem, not the seller's.
And one that isn't on any list
Ask yourself whether you'd still want this house if you had to keep it for ten years.
Most houses people buy are eighty or ninety percent of what they wanted. That's normal, and it's fine. The hundred-percent version costs more or sits in a different town, and even people who build from scratch often find out years later that it wasn't the one after all.
What you're looking for is the eighty or ninety that fits the life you're actually living, on terms that don't squeeze it.
Want me to go through it with you?
On a specific house, most of this takes one conversation. Send me the address and I'll tell you what I'd want checked.