Last week I took my clients to look at a home. The home was listed as a 2003 with an "Arizona Room", storage sheds, gas heat and a refrigerator included.
We open the front door and the first thing we notice is the empty space in the kitchen where the refrigerator should be. My buyers were a bit disappointed, but willing to continue the home tour. The next thing we notice, no Arizona room... hmmm, where could it be? We laughed a bit about the missing room, but, my good natured buyers are still interested.
Time to look in the back yard. For some reason there is a pile of stuff, ancient tv's and boxes of odds n ends on the back patio. We quickly realize that the sellers emptied out the sheds, TOOK the sheds, and left the stuff. Wow, no sheds?? Now we are a bit annoyed. This is not a bank owned home, it is a traditional sale.
My buyers decide that, warts and all that this is a good home and they want to make an offer on it. We put it together and sent the offer over. We received a counter that stated the home would be "AS IS" and shortened the inspection to 5 days (from the typical 10), and they only gave us 72 hours before our earnest money would become non refundable. Mind you, this is a CASH deal and we had already agreed to a very short close. I told the sellers agent that I did not feel this was fair and I would not recommend that my buyers sign it due to the 72 hour contingency. Long story short, we were able to negotiate out the 72 hour close and agreed to the 5 day inspection period. Now we are cruising along, so I thought....
Two days later we go meet the home inspector. Guess what.... there is NO gas at this property and it is NOT a 2003 home, its a 1995!! That is a lot to take in for my poor buyers and they are feeling a bit jaded at this point. I called my broker who was in disbelief at all the discrepancies. Our options were basically to move forward or cancel. My buyers talked it over and said they felt they should get a discount because all of the systems and the roof were 8 years older than we were led to believe. The buyers used the word "misrepresentation" several times during this conversation.
So, I wrote up the BINSR for a $2000 discount. The seller had the nerve to get angry about it! They offered an OLD refrigerator and $500. When I told them the buyers would like to buy their own refrigerator and asked for $1000 instead. The seller was pretty nasty about it, took back the offer of the refrigerator and said "$500, take it or leave it". I had been very polite and respectful through this process, but it was getting hard to take at this point. I gave the buyers time to decide what they wanted to do and they agreed to the $500. Today the buyers went to sign closing documents and the septic had not been certified yet and we are closing tomorrow!!
When the title company contacted the listing agent she said "Oh, does it have septic?" Since her seller had signed the septic addendum, you'd think she would have put that together ...... oh, whatever..... anyway she told the title agent to call me and ask me to set up the septic pump, What??? I let her know that taking care of the septic was HER job, through a nice enough text on the phone.
Has anyone had an experience quite this bad with a listing???
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