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Thinking of Buying a Columbus Foreclosure, Short Sale or HUD Home?
January 14th, 2009 categories: About Me?, For Home Buyers
Expect the Unexpected
Many homes in neighborhoods around Downtown have very old sewer lines going from the home to the main line in the street or alley. Be aware you may have to replace them.
And make sure that you aren’t too tight on your margins, you will need an ever expanding checkbook to finance those unexpected fixes. How about this nice Columbus Foreclosure in a good, up and coming location at an attractive price. It was rehabbed for more than the owner expected and last week they had to spend a lot of money to find out they needed to excavate the front yard and replace the old sewer line which was full of tree roots from the only scraggily tree even close.
Had this been a normal seller-buyer deal, the Seller should have disclosed that they’ve had trouble with the sewer lines before–as evidenced by the five feet of cleanout cable that was snapped off and embedded in the roots in the middle of the old sewer line.
But that’s after the sale. During the sale, expect to the leave lots of time for the lender/Realtor/Seller/Attorneys/Loss-Mitigation department to hurry and wait for some document or another. A typical 30 day closing can easily turn into 90 days these days.
An example: I have clients buying a good home in a great location at a good price. Offers were subject to bank approval (short sale). We made an offer, the Seller accepted the offer and the bank is considering accepting the offer. The first thing the bank wants to see is a preliminary Settlement Statement detailing exactly how much, if any, money they will lose on the sale of the house. One of the principal lines used on a settlement statement is the mortgage payoff.
Typically, the Title company puts this together and sends it to the bank. In this case, the title rep calls the bank for the mortgage payoff and is told that they need to call an attorney’s office who is handling the pre-foreclosure for that information. That attorney’s office tells them it’ll be 7-10 days for them to get that information to the title company so that the title company can put it in the right line and send it to the lender.
WHAT? Who knows better than the lender what the mortgage payoff is?? This is the kind of unexpected lunacy you have to live with to get the house at a good price.
