So, you’re getting ready to sell your old vintage house, and you’re confident it will sell quickly. After all, what’s not to love? The charm, the history… the oil tank buried in the back yard.
In the olden days, homes used underground oil storage tanks with furnace oil, instead of natural gas, to heat their homes. In fact, if your house was built before 1982, chances are you may have an underground oil tank on your property and not even know about it!
As homeowners moved on to more modern forms of heating their homes, the oil tanks remained buried in their backyards, old and forgotten. Unfortunately, this does not bode well for your potential sale as the longer you keep the oil tanks in the ground, the higher the chance for soil and groundwater contamination.
1. Time Is Money
Once you discover an underground oil tank on your property, it becomes your legal obligation to either remove it or disclose it. If you chose not to remove a tank, you will ultimately be drastically shrinking your list of potential buyers, and the longer your house sits on the market, the more it will cost you.
2. You Could End Up Paying Litigation Costs
If your sell your house without disclosing an underground oil tank, you may still end up covering all the costs involved in removing it for the new owners, as well as potentially paying damages and litigation costs, which could run upwards of $10,000.
For real estate agents, it’s equally important for find trusted oil tank removal partners to protect your reputation as an agent and help your buyers and seller close deals.
3. Buyers Beware
If you’re hoping to sell to a builder to avoid negotiations with a buyer, you may end up costing yourself more money, as having an oil tank on the property can make builders weary. There are many factors in an oil tank removal that can be quite stressful to take on, and a purchaser can use that to their advantage.
In many cases, the sale of a property with an underground oil tank results in a sale price that is drastically reduced, as the purchaser can argue that the maximum possible costs should be covered. This could result in anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000 being taken off the list price, and while there are extreme projects that can amount to this, we find that most of our jobs do not even come close to this cost.
Protect the value of your home, and get the experts at Waterline Environmental to remove your residential oil tanks.
Removing An Underground Oil Tank
To avoid a stressful, messy, and expensive situation, we recommend removing an oil tank from your property as soon at it’s discovered. The longer a tank is left untreated, the more likely it is that it will rust and leak oil into the soil, resulting in soil contamination and further soil remediation and/or foundational underpinning to return the site to its natural, healthy state.
Contact Us Today!
If you suspect you have an underground oil tank on your property, call the certified professionals at Waterline Environmental today.
Contact us today and we’ll provide you with a firm quote and keep you updated throughout the entire process.
President: S.A. (Stu) Ferguson
Email: waterline@idirect.com
Direct: 905-876-8298
Office: 855-333-6604
Fax: 519-856-2149
