You Can Never Be Too Careful

How EDR is helping buyers and sellers ensure the safety of their families

By John Voket

In every industry, there are leaders and followers; innovators and copycats. So when a potential homeowner needs to know about the quality of the air his or her family will be breathing, the purity of the water they will be drinking, and the integrity of the soil their home is built on, they often depend on one of America’s original residential environmental risk information companies.

Connecticut-based Environmental Data Resources (EDR) comes to the table with plenty of experience and a proven track record of providing solid information to commercial clients for nearly two decades. Generating more than 750,000 commercial environmental risk reports every year, EDR’s offerings have been required reading for not only environmental professionals, but lenders, attorneys, corporations, insurance companies, government agencies and real estate professionals.

According to Ben Cesare, EDR’s managing director of residential services, his company has been the “go-to” partner for large-scale commercial and municipal environmental data since 1990. EDR has amassed such a depth of resources that it has, in recent years, opened up its information pool to residential customers in the form of the EDR Neighborhood Environmental Report^TM.

EDR’s Neighborhood Environmental Report identifies potential environmental issues on and surrounding a property that may threaten a family’s health or the value of their investment. Information provided includes locations of reported leaking underground storage tanks, landfills, drug labs, hazardous waste sites, and other issues that can contaminate soil, groundwater and air quality in a home or create other health issues.

“Here’s the case for it in a nutshell,” Cesare says. “Environmental reporting has been going on in the commercial real estate industry since the late ’80s, and EDR was there from the beginning. It was and is conducted today in commercial real estate to protect people’s health and the liability of the landowners. Today, the technology involving isolating environmental information down to the closest acre has advanced to the point of applying it in a residential arena.”

No matter where a potential home buyer or seller may be, EDR’s residential reports, which retail for approximately $150, can serve as the starting point in a pending real estate transaction for homeowners to gain awareness about their property and their neighborhoods. Local EDR-certified home inspectors sell the report and explain to homeowners the information contained within it.

“A real estate agent has enough to manage throughout the transaction,” Cesare says. “EDR believes it’s best to train local home inspection or environmental professionals, who are already attuned to the technical, geographic data in and around neighborhoods, to explain the environmental issues found in our reports.”

With that in mind, Cesare is encouraging agents, who typically have a “sphere” of vendors they recommend, to make their clients aware of these tools at their disposal.

“The EDR report can separate the individual agent from the masses-particularly in a sluggish market or region where buyers are looking for someone who can serve their needs better than the rest,” explains Cesare.
“Buyers have so many more choices today; anything that resembles a clean bill of health or forthrightness about the property is a big advantage in an agent’s marketing toolkit,” Cesare says. “Remember five to 10 years ago when you went to buy a pre-owned vehicle, you might have gotten a vehicle history report on your own; today, more than half the auto sellers make that information a part of the package.”

Unfortunately, when it comes to these reports, people may assume environmental information is unavailable, too difficult to gather or not economically feasible to obtain. Cesare says it is important for any potential buyer or prospective seller to secure environmental information on properties they are considering to live or invest in, and he wants to be sure anyone can afford a basic EDR report.

“Home buyers and sellers aren’t aware that they can get their hands on this level of information because it hasn’t been available in this format for very long, certainly not for under $200,” he says. “But a potential homeowner should look at this data the same way they might consider a sex offender registry. Proximity of risk is critical, and you want to be armed with information before you enter into such a large investment.”

Cesare doesn’t recommend potential clients waste a lot of time trying to search for the complex, detailed data that is sometimes found on a state or government environmental office Web site. He says these details are difficult to access and understand by casual readers.

“Even if you located all records relating to the address in question, you would still have to search the address next door, across the street and behind you. That’s where EDR’s report adds value, which searches and locates records within 300 feet of the property and beyond, depending on the type and severity of the records being searched.

“Obviously, invasive environmental contamination doesn’t respect property lines,” he adds.

The 300-foot or six-acre radius will give clients a first screen, an idea, if they are exposed to vapor intrusion of harmful contaminates, which enter the home much like radon. EDR tripled the 100-foot base guideline recommended by most governmental agencies. Ninety-three percent of the time, EDR’s reports contain positive news about the target property.

According to Cesare, not only buyers, but sellers as well should look at environmental information as part of a due diligence process to examine their own risk exposure. EDR believes sellers should try and go as far as possible with full disclosure because it provides the maximum protection after the sale.

“The seller may want to discount the information,” he says, “but environmental disclosure helps market the property and reduces the risk of action against them and the agent after closing. Maximum disclosure
is better for all parties in the long run.”

The environmental reporting industry also offers baseline reports on target properties and, for an additional charge, adjacent properties. This information is included at no extra charge in EDR’s report.

“Unique environmental issues affect the parameters of the search distance,” Cesare says. “Around a Superfund site, the distance searched should be at least a mile; a leaking tank-a one-quarter mile.”

The company’s data encompasses the entire country, so whether it’s heavy industry in the West, buried fuel tanks in the Northeast, or meth labs in the Midwest, chances are EDR can pinpoint the issue to within a few dozen feet. And these issues are not always intuitive. “Even though the South is ground zero for meth labs, Washington is the first state to devise legislation on disclosure,” Cesare says. “Meth labs are a contentious issue, one that’s becoming of increasing concern to home buyers and sellers.”

Cesare points out that although EDR is a national database information company, its breadth and depth of data allows them to conduct local and regional searches based on specific geographic concerns, whether they are manmade or natural.

“In Florida, we include sink holes in the report because of the frequency of them occurring there, while across the southwest, expansive soils are a big issue,” he says. “Places with oil wells, abandoned or active, like California or Texas, these are of interest to locals in those places.”

Cesare says the issue of long-term effects of environmental exposure has gone mainstream, pointing to a recent Vogue cover story about how environmental contaminants may well be the cause of growing infertility among younger women.

“To paraphrase the Vogue story’s point, since World War II, 80,000 chemical compounds have been introduced by man into the environment, and any one of them might be dumped in local landfills. That’s why every landfill makes our reports,” he says. “What has become clear is that there are landfills relatively close to residential neighborhoods all across the country filled with chemicals that didn’t exist 50 years ago.”

EDR tailors its reports to the residential market based on affordability and the most pertinent concerns. In some cases, an identified issue may justify coming back with more focus, at which point, a trained environmental professional may be called in to analyze the conditions in a more in-depth manner.

“In the time it takes to install a radon test or gather drinking water for testing,” says Cesare, a Neighborhood Environmental Report can be run and our certified inspectors can be talking about results.” RE

For more information, please visit www.edrnet.com.

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