With all of the luxury highrise condos in Downtown San Diego, you can imagine how many of these properties have beautiful natural wood floors.  Whether it’s solid wood or engineered wood (meaning a real wood veneer glued to plywood) all of these wood floors will go through a natural color change cycle as time progresses.

With exposure to sunlight, photosynthesis will occur and wood will generally go through a process where it will actually change colors.  Different types of woods will change colors differently so it’s important that one take this into account when purchasing floors.  It’s best to consult with a professional so they can explain the anticipated changes that can be expected.

One example is cherry wood floors.  When cherry wood floors are first installed, they are actually a lighter color than what they will end up being.  After about 1 year of exposure to light, they will come to their full potential in terms of richness.  Over time however, the wood floors closest to the windows that get direct sunlight will start to lighten as the sun has a bleaching effect on the wood.  What can be done to protect the wood?  It is best to put a UV protectant film on the windows; keep in mind this film may or may not have tinting and that would be up to the individual owner.

High-rise Luxury Condos

Just recently while representing a seller we came accross a situation regarding wood flooring we had not anticipated.  This particular homeowner had installed beautiful African Mahogony hardwood floors.  The floors were approximately 5 years old nad were in pristine condition.  The buyer’s on this property had done all of their inspections and removed all contingencies and the day before escrow when I met them and their agent at the property to do the final inspection, they just about had a heart attack.

You see,  two large rugs in the living and dining room had covered the floors and the color of the floors where the rugs were was about 35% darker than everywhere else where the rugs were not.  This was a surprise to all of us and the seller had not lived in the property so she didn’t even know about the discoloration therefore she didn’t disclose it.  At this point, the buyer’s started panicking and talking about having to sand and refish the floors.  The next morning, I received a request for a seller credit for the estimated amount to sand and refinish the floors.

At this point, the buyer’s had already removed contingencies so they were stuck.  However, before forming an opinion on how to handle the situation, I called a wood flooring professional and had him come out to the property to give us an assessment.   Jim Graham, our local expert, has installed wood floors in over 1000 downtown San Diego highrise condos and his advise was quite different than what we anticipated.  He said that it would be a big mistake to sand and refinish the floors.  He recommended nothing more than leaving the dark spaces uncovered with the window shades up and he said that within 6 months the floors would naturally change colors and would blend in to the other surrounding wood.  That was it, that was the fix!  Leave the floors uncovered and let photosynthesis occur.

The buyer ended up closing escrow and we didn’t alarm the seller of the situation until we met with Jim.  It was a situation where there was no point in having our seller stress out about the buyer not closing.  Once we had a full read on the situation, we shared with our seller what had occurred, but all of the problems were solved at that point so it made for a good experience for our client.

If you are looking for expert representation for buying or selling a property in San Diego, give us a call: 619-309-8011