An older concrete house on Guam can be a good buy. It can also carry work you will end up paying for, and the listing photographs are not where you will find it. A normal viewing tells you about the kitchen layout. It tells you very little about the structure holding the kitchen up.
Start with the concrete
Salt air reaches the reinforcing steel inside concrete and rusts it. Rust takes up more room than steel does, so it pushes the concrete off from the inside. Walk the outside of the house and look at beams, column bases, the slab edge, and the underside of any balcony or canopy. Rust-coloured staining bleeding through the paint is the early sign. Concrete that sounds hollow when you tap it is further along. Exposed bar is structural and needs a builder to look at it, not another coat of paint. Fresh paint on one beam and nowhere else is worth a question.
Look for water that has already been in
Standing water wicks into porous material and stays there long after the leak is fixed. Look under sinks, at the base of walls, around window and door frames, and at the ceiling below any upstairs bathroom. Tide lines, blistered paint, swollen trim and soft skirting are signs that water sat there. Open the cabinets and smell them. If the house was here for Typhoon Mawar in May 2023, ask what was repaired, who repaired it, and whether the material behind the finish was replaced or simply dried out and painted over.
The systems behind the wall
Plumbing and electrical sit behind the finishes, so you are working from whatever is left visible. Ask the age of both, then look at what you can actually see:
- Corroded supply lines under sinks, and staining on the ceiling below a bathroom
- Slow drains at more than one fixture, which points at the line rather than the trap
- A panel with mixed breaker brands, hand-written labels, or rust inside the enclosure
- Outlets near water with no ground-fault protection
- Extension cords doing the job of permanent wiring
- The age of the water heater and pump, and where they drain if they fail
Ask what was permitted
Enclosed carports, added rooms, second kitchens and rooftop structures get added to older houses over the years. Ask the seller for permits and drawings covering anything that looks added on. If nothing turns up, ask the permit office what a job like that should have on record. We do not guess at that, and you should not let anyone else guess at it for you. Unpermitted work is not automatically bad building, but it is a question worth answering before you close, because after that you are the one answering it.
Roof and openings
On a concrete roof, look for ponding, cracked or lifting coating, and staining at the parapet and around every penetration. On the openings, check that shutters or typhoon covers exist, that their fixings into the concrete are sound rather than rusted out, and that frames are not weeping rust at the corners. Untreated timber does not last in this humidity, so treat any wood framing you find with suspicion until you know what it is and how it was protected.
None of this replaces a professional inspection, and you should still get one. It is a list of what to look at, so that you can ask better questions of the seller and the inspector. If you are close to an offer on an older house, we will walk it with you and tell you what the concrete, the water marks and the systems are actually saying. The walkthrough and the estimate are free, and it is easier to find a problem before the keys change hands than after. Call Matt on 671 683-8332.
