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Flood-risk DVD now part of pitch for Natomas homes
By Deb Kollars - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PST Monday, January 1, 2007
Like many who live in the growing Natomas neighborhood on Sacramento's north side, Mike Pettis bought his home with only a fleeting thought about flooding.
It was three winters ago. Pettis, a retiree from the semiconductor industry, was relocating to a new one-story home in an adult community called Heritage Park.
Friends in his old neighborhood in Fair Oaks raised a bit of a red flag about Natomas: Isn't that low-lying land?
But when it came to the buyer-seller transaction, flooding was a non-issue.
"We said, 'Is it in a flood zone?' And they said no. And that was the extent of the conversation," recalled Pettis, now the president of the Heritage Park Homeowners Association.
How the home-buying landscape has changed.
Amid deepening awareness of Sacramento's flooding risks, a group of builders and developers in North Natomas is taking the unusual step of creating and distributing to prospective home buyers a DVD that lays out -- in frank terms -- the flooding threat to Natomas.
It is not every day a new home builder chooses to spotlight a potential negative aspect of a property, and the development group acknowledges it could cost a home sale here or there.
But members believe a robust disclosure process is critical -- given growing knowledge about local levee problems.
"It's better to lose a buyer than have someone buy and not be informed," said Greg Thatch, an attorney who has long represented developers in the Natomas basin, surrounded by levees on all sides.
The efforts are being echoed by the Sacramento Association of Realtors, which is encouraging member Realtors and other agents to make more effort to disclose flood risks when selling homes in Natomas.
