Common Mistakes When Analyzing a Real Estate Deal: Trusting The Seller
by John Occhi, Hemet CA REALTOR®
Mission Grove Realty

If you Want to Read More about Other Common Mistakes Made when Purchasing Real Estate, Follow This Link.

When a homebuyer wants to buy a home for sale in Hemet CA, the seller must complete a stack of disclosures. Heck, I often kid, as we start completing the paperwork that in California, we have disclosures disclosing that there are disclosures to disclose what you know about the property. Then I will ask my seller to try and say that 3 times fast.

A little humor goes a long way - even if it is bad humor. It helps take the tension out of the air that is always present when someone is looking at a stack of legally binding documents involving hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is never anything to be taken lightly.

As the homebuyer though, it is your job to check out what the seller is sharing with you. It does not matter if we are talking about a simple disclosure that a room was painted prior to putting the real estate up for sale or something as complex as a rent roll for a multi-unit apartment building.

The reason the Hemet CA homebuyer is granted a period of due diligence is to check out what the seller has shared. First, you must treat every disclosure as suspect. Granted not all sellers lie, in fact very few of them do - so that boils down to the fact that some sellers of real estate do lie and will not fully disclose what they know or are required to disclose according to the law.

Then other sellers may have a foggy memory. In a town like Hemet, which was traditionally a senior retirement community, foggy memories are not all that uncommon. You must also realize that disclosures are suspect because there is a definite bias on the part of the person making the revealing disclosure. Remember, there are often more than one way to describe a defect or problem - often up for interpretation and as long as a reportable item is disclosed to some minor degree, it is after all disclosed.

Then there are the issues which don't have to be disclosed. Again, because of the senior community we have in Hemet, there are many times when the grown adult children of the homeowner are taking care of the transaction, for any number of reasons which might include both death and incapacity of the elder parents. Even when the grown kids know of problems in the past, they can easily get away with not disclosing and claiming ignorance - and get away with it after the fact.

When homes are sold by the homeowner in an "AS-IS" condition, they still must fully disclose all known defects in the property and everything else required by the law.

Investors typically don't have much to disclose, because they have not lived in the property - but they do have to disclose any recent repairs or renovations made to the real estate. Certainly the bank who has taken a property back in foreclosure will not be disclosing anything - this is a true "As Is" transaction.

Homeowners in preforeclosure who are selling through a Short Sale still have the obligation to report everything they know about a property, just as if they were selling at the peak of the market and earning a profit on their Hemet home for sale.

So, when you want to buy a home - either as a first time home buyer, a move-up or down-size buyer, or a real estate investor make sure you take the time and if necessary spend the money for the necessary inspections to make sure you fully understand every conceivable aspect of the property you are buying ahead of time.

Now Have a Blessed Day,

by John Occhi, Hemet REALTOR®
Mission Grove Realty
Preforeclosure Specialist