Turbulence 2006 (Part 1)

Filed under AFK on February 20, 2006
Keywords: home inspections, moving

I believe I can safely say that the last three weeks have been the most turbulent of my life to date. Over the next few days, I thought I would share with you the upheavals my family has gone through.

As some of you may already know, we have moved. Our house has been for sale since mid-November, and we finally accepted an offer about three weeks ago. Our closing date was supposed to be today.

That did not happen. Let me tell you why.

The initial offer we received from the buyer was well below our asking price. We expected offers below our initial asking price as part of the bargaining process, but this was ridiculously low. Based on information provided to our agent, we knew her father had seen the house and made the comment that he remembered when houses like ours sold for $50,000.

We countered and she accepted. The bank appraisal came in at higher than our original asking price, so the buyer reworked her loan to include closing costs (she had the cash set aside, but opted not to pay it upfront).

Then came the home inspection. The house is almost 30 years old, and needed work when we bought it. Some work we did, some we didn’t even think about, and some we did half-way. We were pretty sure we knew what would show up on the report. And they did.

So did some things we would never have guessed.

(Tomorrow I’ll go into detail about everything that has gone wrong with the house itself.)

The inspection report was about thirteen pages long with a laundry list of items. This was our first source of frustration in this ordeal because some of the things listed had been there when we bought the house. That meant our inspector hadn’t caught them!

Several things our agent dismissed as inconsequential, a few of the things we knew we could easily take care of ourselves, and one or two of them we knew would require professional attention. We immediately set to work on the latter and waited to hear back from the buyer on what exactly they wanted based on the inspection.

She wanted everything. She had a lawyer friend (did I mention she was a paralegal?) write up a very formal checklist that included every little thing the inspector noticed that was not 100%, “as new”. Our agent laughed it off, and while we were a little frustrated, we knew she was a first-time buyer who was getting input from several sources.

We wrote up a list of about five things that were safety/code issues identified by the inspection, or were things I could do on a Saturday. The next day we got a counter back that not only restated everything she had on the original list, but added a few additional, like new closet doors, shutters for the back windows to match the front, and money set aside at closing for new vinyl floors in the bathroom. These were all cosmetic issues! There were never shutters on the back windows to begin with!

At this point, we were less than two weeks from closing. As much as we hated the idea of starting over, we were fed up. After consulting our agent, we rescinded.

The buyer panicked. I can not tell you how satisfying it was to call her bluff, but even though she capitulated, a part of me just wanted to wash my hands of her. Cooler heads prevailed, and we moved forward. A second inspection was scheduled to go over the repairs made.

The buyer never showed and our agent got a fax from her agent asking to rescind and give her her earnest money back. The reason: she never locked her rate in and now the bank is charging her higher interest, which she can’t afford. Our agent quickly assured us that this was not grounds for recision, and contacted her agent to do a little strongarming. With the threat of losing her earnest money hanging over her head, she agreed to meet with another lender to try to work out better financing.

For two days we waited in anxious limbo. At this point, closing would be pushed back at least a week. We’d already started packing and are filling out applications for apartments. Thankfully, we hadn’t turned any of them in. As we neared the end of last week, we finally learned that the buyer worked out a new finance plan and we were back on the road to closing. The “re-inspection” is scheduled for tomorrow, and it’s possible we could close on Friday.

This experience has been horrible. If the buyer had been the only problem, however, I don’t think I would label it as the most turbulent time of my life. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about how the house itself added to the stress and frustrations that have defined this year so far.