Utility connections

In a community, the lot usually arrives with utility stubs at the pad and the community owns the infrastructure up to that point. Confirm precisely where the community's responsibility ends and yours begins, because that boundary is where disputes happen. It is often at the pad, which means the connection from stub to home is yours, including any leak in it.

On private land the whole picture is yours. That means a well or a water connection, a septic system or a sewer connection, an electrical service and meter, and gas or propane if you are using it. On raw land these can represent a very large share of the total project cost, and septic in particular depends on soil conditions that need testing before you commit.

Ask what the home was built for. The data plate records the thermal zone the home was manufactured to, and a home built for a mild climate and installed somewhere cold will cost more to heat than its size suggests, permanently.

Get the electrical service checked on any older home. Manufactured homes from earlier decades were built with smaller services than modern appliance loads assume, and aluminium branch wiring appears in some homes from the 1960s and 1970s, which insurers ask about.