Why this one is permanent
Almost every objection to a house can be renovated away. What is behind it cannot. That is the whole reason the discount holds: when you sell, you are selling to a buyer with exactly the same reservation you had, and there is nothing you can do between now and then to change their mind.
In a hot market the gap narrows and people conclude it has gone away. It has not — it reappears the moment buyers have choice again, which is precisely the market you are most likely to be selling into if you ever have to move quickly.
Buying a road-backing home is not the mistake. Paying the community's normal price for one is.
The range is enormous
A quiet residential collector with a mature hedge and a solid fence is a mild issue that many buyers will trade for a better house. A genuine arterial or a freeway is a different property altogether. What actually separates them:
- Constant or peaked. Rush-hour traffic you can plan around. Steady traffic at nine in the evening you cannot.
- Trucks. Engine braking and air brakes carry far further than cars, and they run at night.
- Grade and barrier. A berm, a sound wall, or a road sitting below your yard changes the experience enormously. A road level with the fence does not.
- Which rooms face it. A road behind the garage and the kitchen is a very different house from a road behind three bedrooms.
- Winter. Bare trees, hard frozen ground and no leaf cover mean five months of the year sound like more traffic than summer does.
If you are buying one anyway
Plenty of good homes back roads, and the discount is exactly what lets some buyers into a community they otherwise could not reach. Go in with your eyes open: stand in the backyard at rush hour with your eyes shut, because photographs never capture noise and it is the thing buyers most often say they underestimated. Then negotiate against comparable sales from road-backing homes, not from interior lots in the same community — you will be buying at that discount and selling at it, so the number you pay matters more here than almost anywhere else.
See also what actually hurts resale value and lot shape and position.