A lot of people assume sewer replacement only happens when somebody’s in a full-blown emergency. That does happen, but honestly, many of the sewer replacements I do don’t come from panic at all.
They come from real estate deals and flip houses.
Two common situations are:
- Someone is flipping a house and they already know the sewer line needs to be replaced.
- Someone is in a real estate transaction and the sewer line gets flagged that it’s bad and needs replaced.
Why older neighborhoods get flagged more
Most of the time it comes down to the age of the home and the pipe material.
If your house is in one of these old 100-year-old neighborhoods in town — and there’s a lot of them — and it has the original sewer line, one of these days somebody is going to deal with that sewer replacement. That’s just how it goes.
In neighborhoods like that, we know a lot of those sewer lines are made out of clay, and they’re prone to problems. You get across the river into another old neighborhood, same thing — those houses are 120 years old and a lot of those sewer lines are bad.
What a flip-house call usually looks like
A good example is a job I did recently where the homeowner had been working on a flip house for six months. He’s working on the roof and siding and all the visible stuff, and he always knew in the back of his mind he had an old sewer line with problems.
Then one Monday morning he woke up and decided, “This is the week I’m going to call and get this sewer line replaced.” He called me, I went over, looked at it, gave an estimate, called in all the locates, got the permits, and got it replaced.
In that scenario, nobody’s arguing about whether it needs to be done. It’s more about timing and getting it handled so the house can move forward.
Where a camera inspection fits in a real estate situation
For me, I usually know the minute the camera goes in if something is wrong. Every now and then I’ll put the camera in and find out the sewer line has already been replaced and it doesn’t need any work. That’s a great surprise, and it does happen sometimes, especially when an investor buys an older house and just wants to check everything before moving forward.
If a sewer line gets flagged during a home sale or a flip, the first thing I’d focus on is what the line is made of and what condition it’s in. Once you know that, the options become a lot clearer — and you can stop guessing.