If I want to buy a home free of plumbing, electrical, heating, cooling and other construction issues, should I lean heavily toward modern construction? Or is that not such a big deal?

I'll definitely use a professional inspector in my first home buy, but that hasn't stopped me from picking up a few 'how to inspect a house' books from the local library and leafing through them, to see what I can learn before I hit my first open houses. Some of the information is unsettling. I never knew I should watch out for aluminum wiring, crotchety old water heaters, properly vented sewer systems and the like. I've always been a renter; that stuff was the manager's problem, not mine.

In reading between the lines, it looks like older homes usually equal more problems. If I buy a quaint, picturesque house built in 1925 and say 'no' to the drab looking 1995 home, I'm also walking away from seventy years of accumulated knowledge in electric, plumbing, heating and cooling systems. [b][i]And[/i][/b] I'm getting a house that depends on older hardware.

Do you think I'm on target here, or am I missing something important? Perhaps most of the 1925 homes that are still standing have all been retrofitted with more modern hardware.

Thanks in advance for any responses. This has been a terrific forum for a newbie like me, and I thought I'd try the experts here with another post.

Old houses may have their issues with wiring, plumbing, heating, etc., but they were usually built to last. I'd take a house built in 1920 over a house built in 2000, and use the difference in what I paid to retrofit the old one. Older houses had real craftsmen involved in their construction (not always, but some of them were built like fortresses). New ones may have cheaper woodwork and trim, plastic interior doors (which I think are really yucky), and they may have their repair issues as well.

I did a valuation on a house about a year ago...a model home that had never been lived in. The vinyl siding was loose and some of it was falling off the house.

I wonder what a house built in 2000 will look like when it's 100 years old? There are many that are 100 or more years old right now that will be good for another 100.

One mistake buyers often make is assuming that new construction doesn't require a home inspection. There are tens of thousands of incidents of new construction where one of the subcontractors didn't complete their work correctly which would become a problem later.
New doesn't necessarily mean problem free. Things like subfloors that weren't properly attached to the floor joists (carpenter missed the beams with the nail gun), heat ducts that were never connected to the duct system and "nail pops" in drywall are quite common.
A lot of people think that once the building inspector signs off and a occupancy permit is issued, everything is great, but building inspectors only look for code issues and builders often discourage buyers from having a home inspection because it's new. They know that there are always inspection issues in new houses.

What PA said! I know many a people personally that bought brand new homes, and I have sold many new or slightly used home. They have had more problems than my 1929 home.

An inspector I know schedules new builds for the later afternoon because he anticipates the inspection process to take alot longer than a 1920 built property.

Thanks, neudot, PA Roadkill and REODayton for your responses. You might very well influence my purchase, as the agent I talked to said pretty much the same thing. It just seemed reasonable that new builds would be less problematic, but I guess that's not the case.

The only comment i would have deals with location,region specific issues and how they relate to the structure (bones of the house). For this post, i believe it may have to do with the location of the house, which looks to be in California as that is where Timothy1 is located. You may have construction issues with a 1920 house as it relates to earthquakes, Coastal issues, etc... What we know today doesn't even compare with what we knew then. We are far more advanced today and our means and methods for construction for homes in earthquake prone locations is immensely different.

Now you could make the case that if a home is standing today, built in 1920, than you would have to believe that it survived some major earthquakes and therefore assume that is is structurally sound. But this may not always be the case. I cant think of one home inspector who literally X-rays the walls and does stress tests on the existing structural components to determine if the wear and tear from the previous earthquakes damaged the structure. To me this is a huge difference between old homes and new homes. The next earthquake could be the last the house ever sees.

Locating a house near the coast has a whole different set of issues that deal with wind erosion, chemical reactions with the salt from the sea water, corrosion and so on.

Sure some old houses are amazing, but personally, i believe that most new homes have less structural issues than the old ones and if the architect and contractor knew what they were doing, it would be a much safer place to live.