real estate is hell
Feb. 2nd, 2019 08:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chhotiiNope, still haven't moved.
A week ago Friday, two business days before movers were scheduled to show up, I awoke to an alarming e-mail chain forwarded by my lawyer, with a demand from the buyer's lawyer that either I pay the buyer $6,000 or that we return the deposit and the sale is off, on the grounds that I didn't disclose that there was a lawsuit pending against the condo association. Panic: What lawsuit? I did read the P&S before signing it and thus put my signature to the claim that, to the best of my knowledge, the condo association was not involved in any pending litigation. Was I supposed to have investigated whether there was any pending litigation? Did I goof? Panicked, I texted my realtor, who assured me that no, this didn't fall on me. He had done the due diligence by having me get the "condo questionnaire", which stated that there was no litigation. So what the hell was this about?
Stomped over to the condo management office to find out had they lied on the condo questionnaire or was this some groundless crazy stunt by the buyer? Well, it is not utterly without relation to reality, but, according to the condo manager, this is bullshit, and furthermore, it's bullshit. There is a thing, which is that the condo association had refused to pay about half a million dollars (rounding to the nearest Woodrow Wilson) on a million dollar bill from a contractor, due to shoddy, unacceptable work, and the contractor was taking legal measures to try to get full payment. But, first off, technically, nobody lied on the condo questionnaire, because the thing is not a lawsuit; it's just a lien against the condo association. Furthermore, it's a lien on the condo association, not on any of the units comprising the condo association, so it should have nothing to do with my unit. And, even further into furthermore, even if the contractor were to be paid every dollar he billed for: the condo association has several million dollars in the bank, several million more than would be needed to cover this bill; and, worst case, even if the condo association were to do a special assessment to cover the bill, my unit's share of the condo association is 0.1139%, and thus my assessment would come to about $514.
I would've been agreeable to taking $514 off the purchase price of the condo to cover this, but no, the buyer's lawyer claims that the risk is far greater than $514, because they buyer wants to flip the unit, and this issue (they claim) could cause the next buyer to have trouble getting title insurance, and the existence of this issue could scare off other buyers. The claim that there could be any trouble getting title insurance is dubious at best. There's been no claim that my buyer himself is having any trouble getting title insurance. There have been other sales and re-financings of other units since October, when the lien was filed, and presumably nobody else has had trouble getting title insurance. It appears that title insurance companies generally agree with the condo association's lawyer's theory, that a lien on the condo association itself is not a lien on the units comprising the condominium. But, something can at the same time be completely true and also just a theory (consider the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, the Theory of Special Relativity, and the theory that Barack Obama was born in Hawai'i.) What do you do with a theory? A theory is no defense against someone believing the opposite of the theory: there could be another buyer who is crazy enough to believe that this lien is a problem for clean title to my unit; the fact that this buyer believes this is a problem is an existence proof of such potential buyers. Thus, by believing that this is a problem, the buyer causes the problem to exist.
Where does this bottom out? Let's say you believed that had a turnip ever been stored in the kitchen cabinets, the title to the apartment is in jeopardy, because the Intergalactic Vegetable Treaty gives right to all turnip resting grounds to the Secret Race of Alien Turnips. Of course, you would have to be schizophrenic to believe such a thing. But your belief proves the existence of person(s) who believe this. Does this cloud the title?
Well, whatever. We don't need to drag ontology into discussions with the buyer's lawyer, because, written into both purchase and sale agreements, there's the provision that if any title issues arise, we have up to 30 days to fix these issues. If within 30 days, the lien disappears, and there's no further issue with the title, the buyer is compelled to either buy my unit for the agreed-upon price, or forfeit his deposit, and the seller of the other place is compelled to sell to me. Theoretically. And the condo management claimed that the contractor's lien would be resolved "within days". Thus I don't see any reason to either give up $6,000 or cancel my plans or argue about this any more. I can just wait.
Waiting is irksome. Not wanting to leave the work of packing and moving all to the last minute, I had disassembled most of my furniture and put most of what I thought we could live without until 1/31 into boxes. We took Vic's gaming PC to my mother's, given away the china cabinet, and stopped buying groceries and eaten most of the food in the kitchen. Arrangements had been made to cancel the electric service, Internet, and rental of a parking spot, and to forward the mail; all that had to be undone. My pillow slides off the head of my mattress every night because my bedframe has been taken apart; Vic does homework sitting awkwardly on their bed because their desk has been taken apart. Vic decided yesterday that they are going through a David Bowie phase and was displeased that I had packed their makeup bag. We are constantly wanting things that have been packed-- extra iPhone etc. chargers, books, the telephone, mugs, changes of bedding and towels-- but digging through the boxes to find these things seems more hellish than just living without, when everything would probably need to be re-packed again soon.
How soon? Obviously this did not clear up "within days". Within days, the condo association received what it needed from the contractor to (probably) put this to rest. That's a huge relief: the contractor is a complete jackass, but his leverage to mess things up is apparently at an end. So, "within days", they got to the point where it's smooth sailing, but not quite to the dock. The lien still exists. The facilities manager has to review some documents, which he should have time to do Monday or Tuesday of next week; then the general manager has to sign off on the facilities manager having looked at that; then the condo association's lawyer can file to dissolve the lien; then that has to go through whatever bureaucratic process that takes; then my buyer will do his title search again and then, hopefully, we can schedule a closing.
But even if all this takes three weeks, 3 weeks of irksome is worth $6,000. That's $2,000 per week of dealing with irksome. Yeah, I can do that.
The nerve-wracking thing is that I do not know what new stunt the buyer is going to pull when the lien is gone. Usually, I would guess, when there's a P&S, both sides want the deal to go through, and will negotiate reasonable little accommodations. Oh, the sink is broken? Oh, dear. Well, here's $200. Your movers got stuck in the snow? These things happen! We will push everything back a day. But in this situation, I seem to be dealing with a buyer who does not really care whether the deal goes through, and thus can make use of any reason to threaten to cancel the deal as leverage to try to get me to concede thousands of dollars. My lawyer had offered reasonable counter-offers to the buyer's lawyer's "$6,000 or we cancel!" We would've conceded $514 without argument. When that wasn't enough my lawyer offered a $6,000 escrow hold-back, which would keep $6,000 of my money in an account until the lien went away-- or go towards solving the problem, if the buyer's worst fears were realized-- but, no. It wasn't about solving the problem, apparently, but just a pretext to poison the deal.
That my buyer is willing to stand firm on such poisonous ultimatums suggests to me that perhaps he has buyer's regret. I'll bet he did not get a mortgage and is unhappy that this would be on his line of credit rather than mortgaged. (There was no mortgage contingency.) Why else would he have regret? I'm selling him this place at an amazingly low price for a condo in Brookline. Didn't he do the analysis of how profitable it would be to flip this place before making his offer? Damn, I should flip this place myself, rather than let him get it for a song. Surely the buyer can't have run into trouble with his line of credit; if he didn't have the cash, then the tune he would be singing would be "this title problem so the deal is off!" rather than "this title problem... BUT I'll ignore it for $6,000". Unless his credit limit has merely been cut, putting him just a couple thousand dollars short, rather than called in entirely. That seems unlikely, though.
I'm not going to agree to a price reduction. If he doesn't have quite enough money, but doesn't have grounds to terminate the P&S, the seller of the other place and I are supposed to get to split his deposit. My share would be $11,750, adequate repayment for all the hassle I've gone through and miscellaneous expenses I've incurred trying to pull this off and a consolation for not getting to move into the cute new condo. (The seller of the other place would get the other $11,750 to compensate her for taking the risk of taking her unit off the market to try to sell to me, when I did not yet have cash in hand, and for waiting patiently while my buyer and I try to work out our shit.)
I imagine that the buyer would be willing to stoop to anything rather than walk away from $23,500, though. Any tenuous claim that I've violated the P&S, thus nullifying the deal. I thought that, by specifying NO MORTGAGE CONTINGENCY and NO INSPECTION CONTINGENCY, he had not left himself any options to bail without forfeiting the deposit. But I had better go over the P&S again in a paranoid way. There are all kinds of protections in place in the P&S. It says something like, the real estate has to be empty and broom-clean at the time of the buyer's walk-through, to protect the buyer from having to deal with mountains of the seller's clutter left behind; and it also says something about the real estate has to be in materially the same condition, except for normal wear-and-tear, to protect the buyer from the seller having a bonfire party in the kitchen the night before closing. If you wanted to be a complete pain in the ass and delay the closing past the 30-day expiration, though, how strictly could one interpret these? If I leave the shower curtain, will he say, "it's not empty, she violated the P&S!"? OK, that's absurd, my lawyer would say "it will take us 5 minutes to remedy this" and I would take 5 minutes to pull down the shower curtain and haul it off to the dumpster. But, "materially in the same condition": there are a lot of little things that are broken, as I've listed before, and the buyer didn't have an inspection so these things were not pointed out to him. He could claim (falsely) that these broken things were not broken at the time of the showing. I'm peering at the on-line walk-through hoping that as many flaws as possible are detectable, should we need to prove these things.
More plausibly, what if my movers are delayed by bad weather? Reasonable people who want a deal to work out understand that these things happen and try to be accommodating in rescheduling things. People who want to torpedo a deal-- can they say "your unit was not empty on the date we scheduled the closing, this just flat-out violates the P&S, the deal is off"? Perhaps I should schedule the movers well in advance of closing, to allow for slippage in the schedule, even though it sucks to not have a place to stay in the town where Vic goes to school. Also, it would really suck to move out and then have the buyer discover some Secret Intergalactic Turnip lien on the title at the last minute after I move out.
Argh, I cannot turn the paranoia up to 100%, I cannot live like that, I become paralyzed if I'm worrying about everything. Perhaps the buyer is not hell-bent on derailing the sale but was just posturing to see if he could get an easy $6,000, and will cut that shit out now that I've proven that I don't back down so easily. Or, perhaps he just can't argue that I don't have things in order once the lien is gone, and either the sale will go through (if he has the money) or I get to keep the deposit (which would be OK too). If he finds some creative way to wiggle out of the deal in spite of me doing all reasonable diligence-- that will suck, but life will go on.
It's just hard not knowing how things will turn out!
A week ago Friday, two business days before movers were scheduled to show up, I awoke to an alarming e-mail chain forwarded by my lawyer, with a demand from the buyer's lawyer that either I pay the buyer $6,000 or that we return the deposit and the sale is off, on the grounds that I didn't disclose that there was a lawsuit pending against the condo association. Panic: What lawsuit? I did read the P&S before signing it and thus put my signature to the claim that, to the best of my knowledge, the condo association was not involved in any pending litigation. Was I supposed to have investigated whether there was any pending litigation? Did I goof? Panicked, I texted my realtor, who assured me that no, this didn't fall on me. He had done the due diligence by having me get the "condo questionnaire", which stated that there was no litigation. So what the hell was this about?
Stomped over to the condo management office to find out had they lied on the condo questionnaire or was this some groundless crazy stunt by the buyer? Well, it is not utterly without relation to reality, but, according to the condo manager, this is bullshit, and furthermore, it's bullshit. There is a thing, which is that the condo association had refused to pay about half a million dollars (rounding to the nearest Woodrow Wilson) on a million dollar bill from a contractor, due to shoddy, unacceptable work, and the contractor was taking legal measures to try to get full payment. But, first off, technically, nobody lied on the condo questionnaire, because the thing is not a lawsuit; it's just a lien against the condo association. Furthermore, it's a lien on the condo association, not on any of the units comprising the condo association, so it should have nothing to do with my unit. And, even further into furthermore, even if the contractor were to be paid every dollar he billed for: the condo association has several million dollars in the bank, several million more than would be needed to cover this bill; and, worst case, even if the condo association were to do a special assessment to cover the bill, my unit's share of the condo association is 0.1139%, and thus my assessment would come to about $514.
I would've been agreeable to taking $514 off the purchase price of the condo to cover this, but no, the buyer's lawyer claims that the risk is far greater than $514, because they buyer wants to flip the unit, and this issue (they claim) could cause the next buyer to have trouble getting title insurance, and the existence of this issue could scare off other buyers. The claim that there could be any trouble getting title insurance is dubious at best. There's been no claim that my buyer himself is having any trouble getting title insurance. There have been other sales and re-financings of other units since October, when the lien was filed, and presumably nobody else has had trouble getting title insurance. It appears that title insurance companies generally agree with the condo association's lawyer's theory, that a lien on the condo association itself is not a lien on the units comprising the condominium. But, something can at the same time be completely true and also just a theory (consider the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, the Theory of Special Relativity, and the theory that Barack Obama was born in Hawai'i.) What do you do with a theory? A theory is no defense against someone believing the opposite of the theory: there could be another buyer who is crazy enough to believe that this lien is a problem for clean title to my unit; the fact that this buyer believes this is a problem is an existence proof of such potential buyers. Thus, by believing that this is a problem, the buyer causes the problem to exist.
Where does this bottom out? Let's say you believed that had a turnip ever been stored in the kitchen cabinets, the title to the apartment is in jeopardy, because the Intergalactic Vegetable Treaty gives right to all turnip resting grounds to the Secret Race of Alien Turnips. Of course, you would have to be schizophrenic to believe such a thing. But your belief proves the existence of person(s) who believe this. Does this cloud the title?
Well, whatever. We don't need to drag ontology into discussions with the buyer's lawyer, because, written into both purchase and sale agreements, there's the provision that if any title issues arise, we have up to 30 days to fix these issues. If within 30 days, the lien disappears, and there's no further issue with the title, the buyer is compelled to either buy my unit for the agreed-upon price, or forfeit his deposit, and the seller of the other place is compelled to sell to me. Theoretically. And the condo management claimed that the contractor's lien would be resolved "within days". Thus I don't see any reason to either give up $6,000 or cancel my plans or argue about this any more. I can just wait.
Waiting is irksome. Not wanting to leave the work of packing and moving all to the last minute, I had disassembled most of my furniture and put most of what I thought we could live without until 1/31 into boxes. We took Vic's gaming PC to my mother's, given away the china cabinet, and stopped buying groceries and eaten most of the food in the kitchen. Arrangements had been made to cancel the electric service, Internet, and rental of a parking spot, and to forward the mail; all that had to be undone. My pillow slides off the head of my mattress every night because my bedframe has been taken apart; Vic does homework sitting awkwardly on their bed because their desk has been taken apart. Vic decided yesterday that they are going through a David Bowie phase and was displeased that I had packed their makeup bag. We are constantly wanting things that have been packed-- extra iPhone etc. chargers, books, the telephone, mugs, changes of bedding and towels-- but digging through the boxes to find these things seems more hellish than just living without, when everything would probably need to be re-packed again soon.
How soon? Obviously this did not clear up "within days". Within days, the condo association received what it needed from the contractor to (probably) put this to rest. That's a huge relief: the contractor is a complete jackass, but his leverage to mess things up is apparently at an end. So, "within days", they got to the point where it's smooth sailing, but not quite to the dock. The lien still exists. The facilities manager has to review some documents, which he should have time to do Monday or Tuesday of next week; then the general manager has to sign off on the facilities manager having looked at that; then the condo association's lawyer can file to dissolve the lien; then that has to go through whatever bureaucratic process that takes; then my buyer will do his title search again and then, hopefully, we can schedule a closing.
But even if all this takes three weeks, 3 weeks of irksome is worth $6,000. That's $2,000 per week of dealing with irksome. Yeah, I can do that.
The nerve-wracking thing is that I do not know what new stunt the buyer is going to pull when the lien is gone. Usually, I would guess, when there's a P&S, both sides want the deal to go through, and will negotiate reasonable little accommodations. Oh, the sink is broken? Oh, dear. Well, here's $200. Your movers got stuck in the snow? These things happen! We will push everything back a day. But in this situation, I seem to be dealing with a buyer who does not really care whether the deal goes through, and thus can make use of any reason to threaten to cancel the deal as leverage to try to get me to concede thousands of dollars. My lawyer had offered reasonable counter-offers to the buyer's lawyer's "$6,000 or we cancel!" We would've conceded $514 without argument. When that wasn't enough my lawyer offered a $6,000 escrow hold-back, which would keep $6,000 of my money in an account until the lien went away-- or go towards solving the problem, if the buyer's worst fears were realized-- but, no. It wasn't about solving the problem, apparently, but just a pretext to poison the deal.
That my buyer is willing to stand firm on such poisonous ultimatums suggests to me that perhaps he has buyer's regret. I'll bet he did not get a mortgage and is unhappy that this would be on his line of credit rather than mortgaged. (There was no mortgage contingency.) Why else would he have regret? I'm selling him this place at an amazingly low price for a condo in Brookline. Didn't he do the analysis of how profitable it would be to flip this place before making his offer? Damn, I should flip this place myself, rather than let him get it for a song. Surely the buyer can't have run into trouble with his line of credit; if he didn't have the cash, then the tune he would be singing would be "this title problem so the deal is off!" rather than "this title problem... BUT I'll ignore it for $6,000". Unless his credit limit has merely been cut, putting him just a couple thousand dollars short, rather than called in entirely. That seems unlikely, though.
I'm not going to agree to a price reduction. If he doesn't have quite enough money, but doesn't have grounds to terminate the P&S, the seller of the other place and I are supposed to get to split his deposit. My share would be $11,750, adequate repayment for all the hassle I've gone through and miscellaneous expenses I've incurred trying to pull this off and a consolation for not getting to move into the cute new condo. (The seller of the other place would get the other $11,750 to compensate her for taking the risk of taking her unit off the market to try to sell to me, when I did not yet have cash in hand, and for waiting patiently while my buyer and I try to work out our shit.)
I imagine that the buyer would be willing to stoop to anything rather than walk away from $23,500, though. Any tenuous claim that I've violated the P&S, thus nullifying the deal. I thought that, by specifying NO MORTGAGE CONTINGENCY and NO INSPECTION CONTINGENCY, he had not left himself any options to bail without forfeiting the deposit. But I had better go over the P&S again in a paranoid way. There are all kinds of protections in place in the P&S. It says something like, the real estate has to be empty and broom-clean at the time of the buyer's walk-through, to protect the buyer from having to deal with mountains of the seller's clutter left behind; and it also says something about the real estate has to be in materially the same condition, except for normal wear-and-tear, to protect the buyer from the seller having a bonfire party in the kitchen the night before closing. If you wanted to be a complete pain in the ass and delay the closing past the 30-day expiration, though, how strictly could one interpret these? If I leave the shower curtain, will he say, "it's not empty, she violated the P&S!"? OK, that's absurd, my lawyer would say "it will take us 5 minutes to remedy this" and I would take 5 minutes to pull down the shower curtain and haul it off to the dumpster. But, "materially in the same condition": there are a lot of little things that are broken, as I've listed before, and the buyer didn't have an inspection so these things were not pointed out to him. He could claim (falsely) that these broken things were not broken at the time of the showing. I'm peering at the on-line walk-through hoping that as many flaws as possible are detectable, should we need to prove these things.
More plausibly, what if my movers are delayed by bad weather? Reasonable people who want a deal to work out understand that these things happen and try to be accommodating in rescheduling things. People who want to torpedo a deal-- can they say "your unit was not empty on the date we scheduled the closing, this just flat-out violates the P&S, the deal is off"? Perhaps I should schedule the movers well in advance of closing, to allow for slippage in the schedule, even though it sucks to not have a place to stay in the town where Vic goes to school. Also, it would really suck to move out and then have the buyer discover some Secret Intergalactic Turnip lien on the title at the last minute after I move out.
Argh, I cannot turn the paranoia up to 100%, I cannot live like that, I become paralyzed if I'm worrying about everything. Perhaps the buyer is not hell-bent on derailing the sale but was just posturing to see if he could get an easy $6,000, and will cut that shit out now that I've proven that I don't back down so easily. Or, perhaps he just can't argue that I don't have things in order once the lien is gone, and either the sale will go through (if he has the money) or I get to keep the deposit (which would be OK too). If he finds some creative way to wiggle out of the deal in spite of me doing all reasonable diligence-- that will suck, but life will go on.
It's just hard not knowing how things will turn out!
