The main advantage to a Newer home is that there is less damage, both from Mother Nature and from previous occupants. You typically get to create your own damage or watch it happen naturally. The main disadvantage to a newer home is that you do not know what kind of damage Mother Nature is going to inflict upon your house. With our changing New England weather, what you see may not be what you get years down the road.
The main advantage to an Older home is that Mother Nature has already inflicted the majority of damage upon your house, and additional damage probably won't occur unless hurricanes, heavy rains or winter blizzards occur, or unless of course, you alter the landscaping or remodel the structure itself. What you see is what you get. Unfortunately, you typically don't get to create your own damage or watch it happen naturally, and there are no fond memories associated with the damage that is there.
Because of the drastic weather changes we have here in New England, I typically define a Newer home as one that is less than ten years old because it typically will take about that many years to get enough rain and serious weather changes to firmly settle the ground in and around where your house is presently built. An Older home, of course, is defined as one that is more than ten years old.
When a house is being built, the ground is graded and tentatively landscaped. A regular rainfall throughout the year would help our houses to settle gradually. But this is not the case in New England. Due to our freezing temperatures here, some houses are built through a winter season and the foundation and building materials have not had the opportunity settle and go through a weather change as of yet. This means that if you move into your new house in February, you may not see any settlement activity (typically known as common wall and ceiling cracks) until the first major temperature change. Dry winter weather draws out most of the moisture from building materials, verses the summer which retains a lot of moisture. Our New England weather changes are what cause materials to shrink in the winter and expand in the summer.
Settlement damage usually occurs after this temperature change. You might even consider it to be major settlement damage, even though it is common settlement damage, simply because it happened to your house. Your first thought would be that your beautiful new home is now a wreck and collapsing around you as you sleep. This is not necessarily so. If your home is a Newer home (less than ten years old) you might notice hairline cracks develop at both interior and exterior locations, particularly within the concrete foundation and door and window corners, and typically in a diagonal manner. Usually these are common concrete and drywall cracks. Sometimes the door and window cracks will follow the drywall seams, forming perfectly straight lines and 90° corners. When they follow drywall seams, they can appear anywhere, depending on the quality of the workmanship: how well the drywall sections were fitted together, whether or not seam tape was used, the quality of the seam tape, the type of nails or screws used to secure the drywall, the quantity of screws or nails used to secure the drywall, and the quality and thickness of the ceiling or wall texture.
Ceiling and wall texturing, and painting, prevent me from inspecting workmanship in order to determine why drywall seam cracks appear. If the house is more than ten years old, most settlement activity probably has already occurred, simply because it has been through several years of serious weather changes. This presumes many things in the older home, such as the house having been well-maintained by previous homeowners; fully functional gutters and downspouts in place; grading and drainage directing water away from the foundation; vegetation which has not been allowed to grow on the roof or siding, or too close to the foundation; and any leaks in the roof, plumbing, or drainage systems, as well as any damage from those leaks, having been repaired immediately to prevent additional damage, which sometimes might be concealed in the walls or ceiling. Those are a lot of presumptions, and typically not all of them are valid for any property.
Let me give you one last tip on older homes... Any type of renovation or remodeling of any section of an older home is going to uncover problems or defects which are not noted in your report, typically because they could not be seen or detected, especially in a furnished structure. Knowing this, you should budget appropriately for unexpected and unforeseen circumstances during any remodeling work that is in the planning stages.
