You’re shopping for a home—how exciting! Perhaps it’s a condo, or your retirement dream home that’s still ‘close enough to the city’. We all love to think of a home purchase as a great (or at least good) investment, but that anticipated future payoff may be completely imaginary if your future buyers get the idea that your home has intolerable noise issues. More importantly, you might come to find that there are noise issues that you didn’t know existed until after you closed and moved in. Not fun! Although this article states that “many buyers have problems with homes in noisy areas, and people will pass on these homes simply due to noise issues”, what about all the people who didn’t realize there was a noise issue? Noise is often a sticky problem that may not be fixable, and so you are stuck until you can rent or sell it.
Not only are the condo walls and doors between you and your several neighbors part of your potential noise issues, but exterior noises may very well infiltrate your yard and come through the exterior walls and windows. Unfortunately, you didn’t notice these noises when you were enamored of the home by the real estate agent for a short window of time (when no trains were passing by and a generator or the giant array of rooftop HVAC equipment neighboring home or business wasn’t running)…or perhaps when you walked the property with no house on it years ago it was truly quiet, but now that you’ve spent 2 years building your dream home there are many more neighbors than there used to be, and the local noise codes are not enforced…
A few examples of unaware buyers who did not do their due diligence and hire a noise consultant before closing the deal:
- Retirees buying a gorgeous hilltop multimillion-dollar estate home in the country overlooking agricultural fields…and during harvest the farm production utilizes loud—and tonal—ammonia dryers, which are completely legal (because agricultural equipment is exempt from the noise code here) but nonetheless audible and annoying to the new neighbor, who now either have to: (1) live with the situation; (2) pay tens of thousands of dollars to mitigate the noise on the produce grower’s property, assuming the farm owners will be generous enough to cooperate; or (3) dealing with the ethical conundrum of selling the completed home to another unsuspecting buyer…they hope!
- A condo owner purchasing a beautiful condo with glass roll-up garage-style door overlooking their patio…but right next to a roof-top kitchen exhaust unit shaft coming up through the building from the restaurant on the first floor that is open until 10pm. The walls surrounding the shaft, i.e., shaft walls, were not designed or constructed to sufficiently mitigate the noise, and even if they were, there could still be some “leftover hum” that bleed into the condo—and even earplugs!
- A developer that wants to make a profit on a beautiful multi-story multifamily building in a very nice area where he hopes to get top dollar for each condo unit. So, he directs his architect not to spend money on “extras” in the designs, so the floor-ceiling design meets the International and of course State Building Code minimum requirements for both airborne and structure-borne noise transmission between units…But the property ends up with noise complaints and threats of legal action from buyers annoyed with hearing every footstep and yelling child’s voice from neighboring units that you have to either sell the project at a loss or remediate all the floor ceilings to avoid your development company’s reputation being completely ruined.
- A beautiful old estate that nowadays has a busy 4-lane boulevard right next to it, and before you bought it you didn’t realize how many semi trucks, car horns and stereos would be so noticeable while you want to enjoy your right to the “peaceful enjoyment of [your] property”. When you then go to hire an acoustical consultant after the fact, they have to inform you that they do not, in fact, have a magic wand and cannot change the laws of physics, and neither the law nor your budget allows for a 16-foot high solid noise wall to reduce—but not eliminate!—said road noise.
- An acoustical consultant should be able to determine if you have a legitimate noise nuisance complaint. A consultant can provide a report to present to local authorities/officials for official consideration. Renters are entitled to the quiet enjoyment of their space as well.
If I could sum this up to one lesson, it would be “BUYER BEWARE”. Or perhaps just “BUYER BE AWARE”. Please look under the hood of this large investment, or your new project as a developer or architect, and give this due consideration. Hey, noise even made the short list of considerations for Dave Ramsey!
HowLoud.com is a website that gives you a score for how loud the transportation noise is, and even provides some indication for how “busy” the area will be from “local sources”. But even this doesn’t really tell you if your neighbor now uses a generator to grow marijuana, or has three screaming kids every day between 3-5 pm while you would be trying to get work done at home just a few short feet away…you get the idea. There is nothing like actual measurements to get to the heart of the “microenvironment”.
If you come across a situation where maybe you like the property a lot and you think there may be a noise source that either could be quieted with mitigation measures, or is a Code exceedance that could be quieted through mediation or legal proceedings, please hire an acoustical consultant that can determine actual decibel numbers for those efforts and help you make a much more informed decision. We can set up a sound level meter for a day or more, that records audio during periods when noise levels are higher than a given dB level, so that you can listen to the sound—be it some mechanical noise, a loud neighbor, birdsong, etc. A sound level meter can often be placed in a location that doesn’t require access to the property itself, but that still provides applicable data. You can then review the data and listen to audio clips and decide if you’d like to proceed toward a purchase…or pass this one by.
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