To start off this post, I have to put a disclaimer. I’m not a real estate agent or an expert in home buying. This post is purely based off our experience of buying a home in the lower 48 versus buying a home in interior Alaska. There are so many differences we encountered during our home buying process in Alaska when compared to buying a home in the lower 48. If you are in this process, or have been, or are about to be, you should know that standards of living here are definitely different than other places. It was a bit surprising, and maybe a little disheartening, when seeing what things were acceptable and even passable under home inspection. SO, with another PCS season upon us - or for non-military folks, moving season - we thought it’d be a good idea to outline the basic things that we learned to pay attention to while house hunting in interior Alaska. Time FrameWe were lucky enough to have the timeline work in our favor when buying here, but it is worth mentioning that buying a home in Alaska can be a drawn out process only because of the lack of manning and peak home buying season being so short. While in most other locations, Spring to early Fall seems to be home buying season, this isn’t necessarily the case for Alaska. We don’t really hit Spring season until mid-May. While homes can be listed earlier than this, the season doesn’t truly start picking up until Summer, which is good because snow can actually hide a lot of problems with the property. But, due to all these factors, a closing process that takes 30-45 days elsewhere can take 60-90 days in interior Alaska. There are just only so many people running all the operations and the log gets backed up. So, number one, be aware that the process here can take much longer than you might be used to and prepare accordingly. Home InspectionsWe’ve already touched on this one but it was pretty incredible to see what passed on a home inspection that we normally would’ve brought up as a huge issue. Even in our own home that we purchased, we received the full inspection and it all looked good but once we moved in, we came across some potentially dangerous scenarios that *should* have been picked up by an inspector. Luckily, Jon is pretty handy and was able to fix these issues pretty early on so it wasn’t a big issue financially or otherwise but it could have been. These issues ranged from plumbing issues and electrical issues to even foundational issues. But the crazy thing is that our house was less than 15 years old when we purchased it. It would seem like some of the issues we found would’ve been easy to spot for an inspector. I’m not saying any of this to say that the inspectors don’t do their jobs because I don’t believe that is the case. I truly have just come to understand that building codes and living situations here are much more lax than other places we’ve lived and…that’s just the Alaska way. ZoningAnother thing that we came across while house hunting in Alaska is that most of the property in and around town is zoned as “General Zoning” rather than residential. That means that you can easily come across a neighbor with a junkyard collection or otherwise undesirable neighborhood situations. This is also just the Alaskan way. We actually put on offer in on our house, site unseen but our real estate agent was extremely helpful in our FaceTime calls. She would call us before pulling up to the house so we could get a good idea of the area and neighborhood. We also had a friend that was here on a short deployment and was able to check out a few neighborhoods for us, which was so nice of him. If you have any contacts at all in the area, I would definitely recommend getting someone to scope things out so you don’t get any surprises. Energy CostsBecause of the high costs of living here, especially for energy costs, it’s very common to find documentation of past heating oil/electricity costs. One thing that we had to get used to with living in interior Alaska was heating our home using heating oil. We decided it was worth the cost for us to have our heating oil delivered and there are many companies that do this. The other option is to haul it yourself. We have a 500 gallon tank buried in our yard that is filled with heating oil that runs the boiler in our crawl space. We use it mainly to heat our water since we also installed a pellet stove to offset the cost of using heating oil in the winter. Our heating oil company keeps a record of how much oil they fill up each time they come. You can have them come as often as you want. Because they have a long time record of how much oil we use, we just have them come whenever our name pops up on their list of someone ready to get topped off. They don’t necessarily come every month or every other month but because they keep a history of how much oil we go through, we can provide that information when we go to sell our house so the next residents will have a good idea on what to prepare for. This is the same case with electricity costs. It is very common to see this documentation on Zillow listings but if it’s not there, you can definitely ask your realtor if the information is available. Being a military family, we wanted our housing allowance to cover all our housing costs so this information was incredibly helpful. Other things to knowBeing so close to downtown, our roads are very well maintained by the city - meaning plowed in the winter - but further out, this may not be the case. We have many friends whose driveways are basically mini-roads and their property is tucked back into the trees. We fully understand the draw to this type of property but when it comes to winter time, the upkeep can be very daunting. Also, unrelated to roads, but you may have heard about the infamous Alaskan mosquitos. They LOVE those properties tucked into the trees ;) We opted to live in closer proximity to other homes, which may not be the typical Alaskan experience that people want to have, and sometimes we wish we had been more brave to branch out of the typical neighborhood experience, but it does have it’s perks when we have less mosquitos in the summer and plowed roads in the winter.
To sum it all up, buying a home here was an entirely different experience than buying a house in the lower 48 and all of these tips only scratch the surface of how our life changed with our move to Alaska. We're always happy to share our experience and answer any questions, or if you have something you'd like to add, let us know! Make sure to pin this post for future reference and consider following us on Instagram to join our day-to-day adventures!
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AuthorWe're just a military family enjoying where we live, one PCS at a time. Follow us as we explore our current home, South Carolina, and beyond. The world is our backyard. Archives
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