Best to ask someone local.

What sort of person? What category am I looking for in the YP, Google Maps, etc?

Contact a demolition company.

Before buying any lot or teardown, you should be aware of other hidden costs. Such as sewers, underground streams, cesspools, contaminated soils, rights of way etc.

Even then, you never really know for sure.

On one 1950s teardown we did, we came across a buried half-filled home oil tank that had nothing to do with the house we demolished. The project manager quickly shuttled the tank off to a recycler he knew. Nowadays the site would be shut down till the AHJ was satisfied no oil had leaked. If it had, the contaminated soil would have to be removed and replaced.

Building is like a box of chocolates....

If you want to start deducting a bunch of costs from the land value as land, the seller will just stop talking to you. All land has development costs. Some need trees removed and a driveway built. That needs the foundation removed, and a new footprint excavated. Call whomever will do the new build, and ask them how much extra that little bit of demo will cost. Probably less than 5K, as long as there is no oil tank buried in the basement, and the utilities are already capped off and visible.

In some areas of the USA, the land/lot is worth way more than the house structure, so removing a house might not lower the land cost at all.

@chispa, in our area I’m fairly sure removing a decrepit house would increase the value of the land

Depending on what you pay for the lot, I doubt you will lose any money after you build a new home and improve the property, and if you know what you're doing, you will run to the bank with a smile.

I did, quite a few of them, with knockdowns and built new homes on the property, all of them were excellent investments.

"How much would it cost a new builder to remove a foundation? I'm not sure right now what the square footage of the old foundation was."

The extent to which you need to remove any or all of the former foundation depends on the type of foundations (e.g., crawl space or basement) and how the footprint of the new home compares with the former home. If there are only small areas where they intersect, you might get by with removing only a portion of the former foundation to save cost. A field trip to the site with your builder and your new home plan will help you get a handle on the cost.

@chispa In this area the land seems to be typically about 1/5 of the value of a house built on it. So an assessment (which I know isn't the same as what things actually sell for) might be something like $100K for the land and $500K for the structure. Of course there are a lot of factors.

The foundation may or may not still in the ground. There is no requirement to remove concrete when a house is demolished because concrete is not considered hazardous waste and considered suitable for fill.

If it had a basement removing the concrete would be at the discretion of the owner hiring the contractor. With a building permit the name of the contractor should be stated on the permit with his license number and the first place I'd look to inquire about the foundation/basement and removal. If none maybe the owner's name who's name is on the permit.

Worst case scenario would be the house being crushed down into the basement hole and covered with dirt costing more in dumpster rentals or trucking and land fill fees than excavation costs. Adding a day or two in excavation fees and the price for disposal would add about $8k for the inconvenience in a worst case scenario if you want to use this to negotiate a lower lot price.

I bought a burnt out house in 92 and had it demolished. It took seven 40 yard dumpsters to remove everything except for the foundation/basement. The excavator operator crushed up the basement floor so water could drain and then collapsed the basement walls on top, then filled the rest with dirt. The reason is the concrete will need to removed anyway if the lot is built on so leaving the concrete as fill saves some on back fill.

@kevin9408 Thanks. Overall, if there is still a foundation, it doesn't seem like dealing with it is as expensive as I thought it might be. Obviously if I move forward I'll try to get more details on what was done.

I recently spoke with builders, landscapers, and our Village development team to explore costs for tearing down a small house owned by our church and retaining the parcel as green space. The lot is small for our town (about 8800 sq ft) and the house is about 1400 sq feet with a detached 2 car garage. Overall cost estimate for the teardown was between $36k and $40k. This is in a suburb of Chicago, and I'm sure costs vary widely by location, lot size, and house (in your case, foundation) size.

Granted, this was a whole house, not just a foundation. But there were some costs I hadn't thought about until I spoke to professionals, including the silt and construction fence rental, the demo permit fees, and the engineering study for drainage (required for any work as there are homes on 2 sides of the parcel.) You will only know those costs for your area by speaking with locals.

In case it helps you know some of the costs to ask about, here are the costs I gathered from multiple sources:

In my small city of about 30,000 people a demo permit fee is $73.00. Yep, I just looked it up and goes to show you how some cities are out to extort every nickel they can from the residents. Organized crime from corrupt mafia thieves out to steal from the working class.

Chicagoans, with luck some hoodlums will use the house to do drugs and burn the house down. 10 grand for an engineering study for drainage? Where and the hell do these morons thing the water is going now! The drainage isn't going to change because you tear down the house. This is what happens when morons take over a city.

Sounds like experience talking.

Demo permit for our current build, Greater Toronto Area municipality, C$695 (US$508).

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A major reason for using all or part of an existing foundation is zoning. As you are only modifying an existing building, you may be able to bypass zoning variance hearings that can drag on for many months with no assurance of success. NIMBYism is alive and well!

I just filled out the demo permit for Minneapolis using Chicagoans quote. Cost is based on the valuation of the work and the total comes to $475 for the permit and $1 to the state. No engineering requirement for drainage. I haven't found a city, county or state yet that charges anything close to what Chicagoans quote was. Even LA California charges a mere $300, Detroit a few hundred and Chicago is $300 along with inspection fees of $75 ea. No mention of engineering review for drainage.

There is something wrong with Chicagoans quote or the city it came from. Maybe a designated zone to preserve low income housing (ghetto)? Chicago does have two of these zones with permits ranging from $20K to $60K trying to preserve shacks and stop progress.

"There is something wrong with Chicagoans quote or the city it came from."

Chances are it is the city it came from.

"10 grand for an engineering study for drainage? Where and the hell do these morons thing the water is going now!" "There is something wrong with Chicagoans quote or the city it came from."

Well, I happen to love my little town :). To make a long story longer, our area has seen a rash of teardowns in the last 30+ years (the town next store was once dubbed by some magazine as "the teardown capital of the US" - ouch.) So drainage has become a huge issue because small homes are replaced by much larger homes that are built to the max allowable, and then there's a loss of permeable surface for the runoff from those new massive roofs.

In the case that I'm involved in, where the hell the water was going was into the basement of the house! That is one of the issues that was a deciding factor against renovation (too much money and work for too little gain.) The whole lot needs regrading and you can believe the neighbors don't want drainage to affect their lots. I happen to be in favor of making sure that new builds don't negatively impact surrounding lots, so I'm all for an engineering study.

As for the demo permit: I was surprised by the cost of that, but perhaps that's a function of trying to control the pace of teardowns. Since people are routinely paying upwards of $500k (that's for a small lot) to tear something down and build bigger, the demo fee certainly isn't stopping anyone. And new builds are going for well over 3 or 4 times that, so it's apparently still profitable.

"Chicagoans, with luck some hoodlums will use the house to do drugs and burn the house down." Actually, that conversation came up at our meetings! (Not arson or drugs necessarily, but vagrants.) It's not a good look for a church to own a house that has been sitting empty in the middle of a nice neighborhood and steps from a school. Despite the Mayberry-ness of the area, we did want to avoid any possibility of vagrancy (racoons being the most likely offenders... but still.) We also talked about the possibility of letting the local fire department do a practice burn, which they have done at some other homes slated for teardown. But the possibility of asbestos made that a no-go.

Some of the comments about the high cost of the demo permit had me second guessing the info I got from our Village. But I looked it up online and the $8600 is correct. There are several other requirements too, and I’m happy that someone else is in charge of the demo process.

The Army Corps has cleared Palisades lots down to the slabs. They're for sale for new construction.