Excellent advice.
My previous house was built in the 80s. My current house was built in the 50’s. There is a BIG difference in the quality. However, I found in this area that one of the things you have to be cognizant of the quality of the maintenance. Or lack thereof. We must have looked at the better part of 100 houses and I’d say out of those, maybe 10-20% were up to my standard. You were just inheriting someone else’s unresolved problems in most cases.
Something that you find when looking at these articles is that they (usually) tend to be focused on surface level concerns that affect renters. Not so much stuff that is for homeowners. But I’ll let you in on a dark pinglist administrator secret: a lot of the reason I do this is to get the responses which are usually better than the article itself. I get some great ideas doing this.
And we are grateful!
PS
Are you still really a Democrat?