Everyone must have a thousand stories. Buying and selling a house. In Britain is a lottery. You pay a fortune to have a property surveyed and if the list of repairs is too great the seller backs out. If you have a walk-through survey carried out you could be faced with a lifetime of nightmare repairs. You buy a house and sell yours and two weeks before moving the seller finds a better price and you are left wondering whether to move into rented accommodation to sell your house. We have bought three new houses in our travels. Number one had a toilet full of excreta, bricks and rubble in every room. Numder two had no water supply, the gas supply pipe was twenty feet short and I fitted a pipe only to watch the central heating boiler blow up. There was a hole in the bath and temperatures were sub zero. We eventually downsized to a second hand apartment ten years ago and I am still carrying out repairs. What's it like in America?
You poor fool Jim - didn't you see what you described there I hope you're happy in your apartment but a shame you're 'still' doing repairs, hope that comes to an end soon and you can relax (I'm near to London, so can't answer your question)
My hardest house purchase was from an elderly French lady who didn't really want to sell the house. She was selling it to get her daughter out of the house, it turned out. The old lady threw every obstacle in our path that she could, balked at everything, turned the electricity off before the inspection (and threw a North Korea-worthy tantrum when she had to pay to have it turned on again), and turned up at the inspection and screamed at the inspector that he couldn't run the water, turn on the lights, run the heat and air or open the garage door. Her agent had to follow her around and explain the facts of life to her. If it wasn't that we really wanted that house, we would have "walked" immediately. As it was, we paid her asking price (it was a fair price). She wanted to raise the price after we had signed the contract and was very unhappy she couldn't. At the closing, she sat with her back to us until the final signing and then spat at our feet and said "I hope you never have a happy day in that house" and stomped out. We were nothing but polite to her throughout the whole process.
I'm in Herts... never had any kind of problems that you've had @Jim Nash .. I'd have lost my sanity if even one of those things had happened to us...
In the U.S., unless someone is paying cash for a home, the banks and the insurance companies (coupled with broker laws) are pretty much in charge of the sale. While it is true that the banks are not in the real estate business, they won’t loan money if a default can’t be resolved by a good sale and they will generally not loan money above the property appraisal. FHA or FHA/VA loans are a problem to get if the property isn’t up to code complete with electric smoke, radon, and carbon monoxide detectors and very little can be grandfathered in when it comes to present day building codes. Note: There have been times when an inspection is made prior to a sale when the city or county will intervene and condemn the whole house. In the case of people flipping houses and those ear marked as “fixer uppers”, the investor has to have some substantial collateral to obtain a loan. Even then, a contractor has to be employed and licensed electricians, plumbers etc have to do the work in order for a final inspection to be made. Now, that isn’t saying that people do not buy houses that need a lot of work and then do it themselves. In short, caveat emptor. They still have to jump through a lot of hoops to get insured and pick the right times to get a lot of the work done and unless they are fully qualified to do the work, a lot of work gets done via the back door. In our area, illegal immigrants do much of the roofing and in order to avoid the inspector and having to pull permits they will do their work on the weekend when the inspectors aren’t around. I’ve seen the shingles come off and new ones reinstalled in a single day and for half the price of a contractor who goes through the legal process. I personally like fixer uppers but then I was raised in a construction family and know my way around. That said, I have to start with something that is financially capable of being fixed and can actually be lived in whilst the repairs are being accomplished. My wife and I have rented properties and fixed them up for a reduced rent or no rent for a couple of months as long as the owner provides the majority of the materials.
If I don't like the smell of a house - I don't enter - no way Pedro ! I may have missed a good 'un, but so be it
I've owned four homes in my life. Two of these were brand new. The worst thing about buying any of these homes...was the endless paperwork.
I, too, @Babs Hunt have owned four homes and rented a few. A couple have fond memories, one was a fixer-upper, and we have been in this house for 26 years. The only real problems we had was buying our only brand new house. We put it under contract at the beginning of the "Jimmy Carter Stagflation Era" and it nearly destroyed us financially. I am sure we would have declared bankruptcy if it hadn't been for a wonderful man who was a truly great real estate agent/broker. He managed to get our house sold to a tennis pro who used it as a dormitory for his students and could use the terrible interest rate as a business deduction.