As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/
Real Estate questions.
azith28
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hi,
So for the last several years I've been noticing a home that I drive by every day to get to my Apartment. I've seen a for sale sign appear for months at a time, disappear, then come back later. I've even looked at it on trulia/zillow when it was on the market. Back in November of last year I noticed it had a different sign...it was up for auction. I looked it up and found that the sites were slim on the details, and pictures seemed to show nothing seriously wrong with the home, I asked a Friend of the Family (she lives in a different state) if she could find anything out about it. The auction was saying the sale would start around 87k, but my friend found out that it was expected that the lender was basically going to force the price up to 160k so I forgot about it. This week I see the house up for sale again. This time not an auction, so i looked it up again...its selling now for 125k. This home originated at the 200k price, and its only 11 years old..most of those 11 years not being actually lived in.
Given the homes size and area I get the impression that this is a pretty large and nice home for that price. However the number of times it has changed hands and the price going down so much has me worried. If someone had bought the home, then found some kind of structural flaw or some critical repair/code violation in the home, would they be required to report this on the sale sites? If i asked a retailer to view the home would they be obligated to tell me of any serious problems? Would it be normal to expect me to pay someone to do a review of the home as part of an interested buyer situation before i forked out any money (except for the review cost). ?
Thanks
Stercus, Stercus, Stercus, Morituri Sum
0
Posts
But if you're actually interested I suspect any Realtor(tm) in your area would know what's up with that property.
Probably not on the sale site (don't know what you mean by "retailer"), but very likely your state/county would require them to disclose any known defects at some point in the buying process. In Texas that is after the house goes under contract. So you'd have your agent draw up an offer letter which would have some legalese in it, but it basically says "I'll buy the home for $118K, dependent upon it passing a home inspection without serious defect" and you'd plop down "earnest money" ($1K to a few thousand) into escrow. Then if you and the seller come to terms then the house goes "under contract" and is not open to new offers. Then you have some time (say a month, this would be dictated by the offer letter and eventual contract developed) to inspect the house and get your financing fully in order, and you'd pay a 3rd party home inspector to check out the house for issues and you'd ask the seller for disclosures. If there are major issues (either in disclosures or found by the inspector), then you could either have the contract reworked (reduce the price, or require repairs be made, or get cash back at closing to do repairs yourself) and the earnest money in escrow would go towards the purchase amount, or you could let the option expire as major issues should mean you can back out of the purchase (assuming your contract is written properly) and get your earnest money back.
its common for banks to auction homes and have a starting bid way lower than reality
in cases of foreclosures, the lender also gets first right of refusal for offers if the offer is below the value of the mortgage
so it sounds to me like the owner of this home had a major financial hardship, and possibly a serious issue with the house, tried to sell it, failed, and then the bank took it and is trying to dump it
if this is true then it's probably best to stay away
Maybe it's the "snake house."
http://abcnews.go.com/US/snake-house-family-home-idaho-turns-satans-lair/story?id=13851600
I bought a house that basically had this exact history. The house was in the middle of being renovated and the bank foreclosed it and finished it.
It's not a trainwreck, and for the price it was actually a pretty great deal. After living in it for 4 years though, it becomes very obvious all of the places the bank cheaped out... from light switches that don't quite stay "on," to creaky floors, to a sewer system that should have been replaced and wasn't because "good enough."
If you don't mind patching up a variety of small projects over time, it can be worth your time, but if you would need to hire outside help might be best to look elsewhere.
You can't give someone a pirate ship in one game, and then take it back in the next game. It's rude.
In any case people in Canada at least, generally put a home inspection as being contingent on their offer to buy a used house. As the buyer you're ususally the one paying for this but it's a pretty important thing to cut down on your risk or at least go into a purchase being better informed. You can then potentially renegotiate with the seller based on the defects found either through price or the seller fixing defects(or you accept them). In very hot markets buyers will sometimes do the home inspection before making an offer but that can get costly as they may accept a higher offer instead.
They can miss stuff and the quality of inspectors can vary dramatically but most people I know use them for used homes. In any case no matter what you do you can likely expect some minor items to be wrong that you won't know about going in.
It was almost certainly foreclosed on. They probably tried to sell and couldn't then were forced into the redemption periodwhere they are forced to sell, but perhaps they couldn't get a high enough offer to get the lender to agree to sell short. Now it is a lender auction.
It could be fine. Could be a disaster. Call the representing realty and ask to see it. If you live in the US they are required by law to disclose basically everything about the home. You can probably even look at the disclosure document online. If not ask the realtor for it.
but they're listening to every word I say
It's slightly sneaky, but you could try walking around the neighborhood on early evenings and weekends, and talk to neighbors about the house to see what they know about it. Just be advised that you're 100% subject to lots of conjecture and hearsay about the property and its former owners.
This can be as easy to repair as, e.g., punching holes in drywall, but could also involve things like ripping out appliances, damaging pipes, pulling up floors, etc.
I mean, they're in the process of losing their home. It sucks. But it also sucks for whoever has to come along and fix them.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
I literally live about .5 a mile from the home. It's right up against the property wall of my apartment complex, so I'm not really worried about the area. I put in an email to a realitor, I'm going to see if I can schedule a look around inside and see if i can find any obvious problems. Not claiming to be an inspector but I should be able to tell if someone has left a rotting corpse or pile of shit under the stairs.
Yes, I also saw that Flip or Flop episode.
>.>
/s
I once saw a house where water and mold had liquified the ceiling in one area and the drywall was melting.
You mean it features a "zero-gravity pool" and a local greenhouse.
Check out the house, but there's a lot that can screw you over that you can't see without a good inspection. And sometimes but even then.
This can't be stressed enough, especially if you're a first time home buyer as they think/know they can pull a lot of shit over on you and you won't even realize what they've done until too late.
The thing with real estate is not dissimilar from everyone walking by that item in the store with the obviously dented or smashed box. Why don't you grab that one? Why pick up the item with the perfect, pristine box, when the smashed one is in front of it and, well, is *probably* fine on the inside?
If the house was a good deal, why hasn't anyone else bought it? Are you the only person looking to buy a house for $125-160k in your neighborhood?
I've taken a look at some foreclosures, short sales, and similarly "distressed" homes. Any of the ones that are salvageable are snapped up by flippers who gut the place and put a stainless steel range vent in the kitchen. The rest sort of sit and rot.
Sometimes, you can find a diamond. Usually, though, the diamonds are sitting out there in the open, and lots of people are walking by, and it's more like finding a $20 bill on the street -- you KNOW that if you don't pick it up, someone else is going to grab it pretty fast, so it's not like the $20 has just been sitting there out in the open for a few years waiting for someone.
All that said, you can talk to a realtor and go see the place for no cost. Hiring an inspector DOES cost money, although usually not that much -- you can google avg inspector prices in your area. You have to be somewhat serious to hire an inspector, though, because otherwise the seller won't allow you to inspect the house. What's more, they may sell the property AS IS, which means the inspector is simply for you to find out what's wrong with the place. Importantly, inspectors can't move, remove, or physical adjust things in the house. They can, of course, open doors, hatches, lids, and such, but if they are not physically able to get behind something to look, or poke into cracked parging, or whatever, then they just give you some guesses.
For bank owned inspections, absolutely this is true, you get an amount of time to look at the house, anything that requires a screw driver to see you are shit outa luck, and often they won't let you into the attic or crawl spaces.
For home owner inspections, often if you ask they'll let you take a more in depth look at things, like if I want to take a look in a fuse box, "hey can I look in this fuse box?" most often the answer is yes. And I'll open it and check wire size and if it's double tapped. Can I look in the attic? can I look in the crawl space?
On a personal note. I will be a happy camper if I never have to go into a crawl space again. I hate spiders.