Houses With a Past
For history lovers, nothing beats the charm of a home built in a bygone era.
Just make sure old-house buyers know what they’re getting into. By Meg White
Growing up in mostly brand-new homes in
Texas and New Jersey in the late 1960s and
1970s, Kirsten Oravec was raised to believe
that newer construction was always the
safest and most reliable home purchase
one could make. No plumbing or electri-
cal ticking time bomb to fret about. No
worrying whether the roof would buckle
from layers of replacement shingles dating
back to the FDR administration. When
Oravec bought her first home in 2003, Pla-
no, Texas, offered few options outside of
new construction. Her second purchase,
in southern New Jersey, was also freshly
built. What nagged at her, though, was her
strong aesthetic preference for an older
house. She had always admired her aunt’s
century-old farmhouse in Pennsylvania.
“It was pretty run down,” she recalls. “But
there was just such charm, and you don’t
get that in a brand-new home.”
Four years ago, Oravec did what she
had long considered unthinkable: She
bought a home built in 1930—and has
never looked back. Sitting in her small
84-year-old cottage on the shores of Lake
Gilman in southern New Jersey with wind
chimes and birds echoing behind her,
Oravec has found her bliss both as a home
owner and a real estate practitioner. “It’s
just a beautiful setting. My desk, when
I work from home, overlooks the lake
and I love it,” says Oravec, who obtained
her license a year ago and now works as
an associate with Berkshire Hathaway
HomeServices Fox & Roach, REALTORS®,
in Mullica, N.J. Everything from the sweet
little footbridge on her property to the
boat races and pie-eating contests of Lake
Gilman Day has her smitten with the “On
Golden Pond” setting. “It sounds kind of
sentimental, but it really is all that,” she
says. The home was originally used as a
cabin-like summer house, but she had the
second floor converted to create two bed-
rooms.
The Over-70 Set
America’s housing stock is relatively
young: 40 is the median age of U.S. homes.
Still, many buyers are drawn to properties
with a considerably longer past—that is,
homes built 75, 100, or occasionally even
200 years ago. The relatively rarefied
ranks of older homes— 15 percent of the
current U. S. housing stock was built before
1940—makes these properties special. And
even though what constitutes a “historic”
home depends greatly on where you live,
anyone who works in a neighborhood of
older homes must bear crucial issues, and
misconceptions, in mind.
Developing a comfort level with older
homes is often necessary simply because
they are mainstays of the local inventory.
The new-home niche is limited by land
availability, Robin Zeigler, a historic zoning
administrator for Nashville, Tenn., points
out. “There’s only so much land,” says Zei-
gler, who was formerly a board member of
the National Alliance of Preservation Com-
missions. “More and more, we’re working
with existing buildings.”
For some home buyers, an older home
represents someone else’s choices; you may
have to provide the necessary imagination
to help them see it as their own. Others,
like Oravec, are apprehensive about the
work and money they presume they’ll have
to put into an older home.
Rick Fifer, a salesperson with Florida
Executive Realty in Tampa, Fla., and a spe-
cialist in early 20th century bungalows,
does his best to educate buyers on the costs
of rehabbing and insuring older homes.
He says many people overestimate the
costs associated with an older home—or
underestimate those of a newer home. It
all comes down to how well the home has
been maintained. In many cases, “an older
home is no more a ‘money pit’ than a new
house,” he says. “If you’ve done nothing to
maintain it, your ‘new’ house that you’ve
lived in for 10–15 years can still cost a small
fortune to fix.”
And reproducing the charm that comes
standard on older homes—in the form of
old hardwood floors, stained glass, and
thick baseboards—is much more expen-
