A freshly painted apartment can hide a building that has been working hard for twenty years.
Older buildings are not automatically worse. Many have better locations, larger homes, better ventilation and more settled communities than anything being built now.
But age makes the building’s history part of your decision. So before you decide, spend a few minutes looking past the front door.
Start with the lifts
In an older block the lifts are the single most expensive thing that can go wrong, and the one you cannot work around.
One lift down for a day is an inconvenience. One lift serving a twenty-storey building for three months is a different life, and it is the kind of repair that stalls when there is no money set aside for it.
Then ask about water
Cauvery, borewell, tanker, or some combination, which is the usual answer. In an older building the question is less about the source than about what has changed: a borewell that yielded twenty years ago may be doing much less now.
Ask the guard or a resident rather than the person showing you the flat. What this costs you every month is worth a note of its own. We wrote one.
Look for seepage
Paint is cheap and seepage is not, so this is the one thing a viewing is actively arranged to hide. Look where the paint is newest.
Find out what happens when something breaks
This is the question older buildings are actually decided on, and almost nobody asks it at a viewing.
“Maintenance is ₹X” tells you nothing about the month the building needs ₹5 lakh of work.
A building with a reserve fixes things. A building without one holds a meeting, raises a special levy, and argues for a season, and you are living in it while that happens.
Ask what the backup actually covers
“Generator backup” means four different things in four different buildings. Ask which of these are on it. In an older block, often not all four.
Usually the first thing covered. Confirm it, especially above the tenth floor.
The one people forget. No pump means no water in the flat, whatever is in the tank.
Corridors, the lobby, the gate. Cheap to run and normally included.
Often partial: a few points and lights rather than the whole flat, and rarely the air-conditioning. Ask how many points, and where.
And ask about the building’s people
An older building is run by its association, and how well it is run is the difference between a characterful home and a two-year argument.
If you can, speak to one resident who has lived there a few years. Not the person showing you the apartment.
