The Tale of Two Houses (part 1)

House #1 was a custom-built brick ranch, constructed in the summer of 1962 on a hillside in a quiet neighborhood. In the beginning of this year the original owner, for health reasons, decided to sell this wonderful old house.

The seller (we will call her Mary) well, because that’s what her name is. Mary called a local Real-estate Agent and came up with a price comparable to the houses in this neighborhood. The house was listed at $295,000. A few years ago, houses in this neighborhood at this price sold almost the next day. The house stayed on the market almost 60 days before an offer of $277,900 was agreed upon, of course contingent on the buyer’s home inspection.

Mary was hesitant about taking this offer, but with the time issue, it would be worth the cut in price to have the house sold, and move in to her assisted living complex. However, Mary did not expect what happened next...

The buyer contracted a professional Home Inspector and waited for the Home Inspector’s report. The Home Inspector was a professional and did not nit-pick, but did find some major components of the house to be in the last part of their useful life.

To make a long story short, the list consisted of:

1. Old waste lines in the crawl space that needed to be replaced.
2. The roof did not leak, but was at the end of its life and needed to be replaced.
3. An aging oil furnace, that needed to be replaced.

This came to a modest grand total of $15,200.

Mary agreed to sell at the lower price and also had to have the repairs done.
This brought Mary’s loss to, well you do the math.

Did Mary have to agree to that? No, but she needed to sell and it had already gone this far, and she took a big loss.

Suppose Mary had known about the $15,200 worth of repairs prior to placing the house on the market. She would not have allowed herself to get caught in this situation.

The moral of the story is that the small fee for a pre-listing inspection would have saved Mary this nightmare, not to mention money

Join me tomorrow for the Tale of Two Houses (part two).