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Oh my God!!! It's the attack of the KILLER MOLD in your new home, grab the kitchen shot gun

By
Real Estate Broker/Owner with Prudential California Realty/Gem Mortgage

Now, here is an interesting situation:  One of my agents recently sold a home(of course to her cousins).  These days, just the fact that an escrow closed is a cause for celebration alone.  But after the effects of the tequila wore off, the buyers notice a problem with the water heater and called a plumber....   The plumber came out, complete with plumber's crack, beer belly and pocket doughnut, to the house and promptly refused to crawl under the home because of the "Killer Mold" that he had observed while flashing his torch under in the crawl space. 

Now, the words, "killer mold," conjures something of the spirit of the 1950's movie, "The Blob,"  in which the helpless masses are held hostage by a red blob creature, several stories high, that begins to digest the entire civilized world.....

Without properly discussing their options with their realtor, the panicky buyers used the mold reference that the plumber gave them, desperate to survive the onslaught of the killer mold blob, and promptly shelled out over $2000.00 to exterminate the evil UFOs and alien mold body snatchers....Well, if you have been around as long as I have, you have got to question the whole, scratch my back relationship between the plumber and the Mold Man, especially since they both looked like twin brothers down to the overalls.  Now that all the "mold" has been removed, we can't even verify if it was there in the first place!!! And of course, the home warranty does not cover mold.

On one hand, this kind of reminds me of the time when we sold a home to a lady who called 6 weeks later screaming that there was a mouse in her garage, and why could we not come over there and, "take care of the mouse problem." On the other hand, mold is very dangerous and can cause all kinds of health problems.

Needless to say, my hapless agent(family member of the buyers) was frantic and concerned about the coming Holiday Schedule.  You know, Thanksgiving with the Moldies, and Christmas gift exchanging with MOLDACLAUS, etal.  Anyway, she comes in defeated into my office completely not sure what to do.  They didn't tell me about how to handle this one at the Manager's training meetings.

Now, I do believe in full disclosure, but how in the world can you prove that the sellers knew they had mold?  Even the home inspector never caught it, his inspection report came back squeaky clean.  After close examination of the broker file, I suggested perhaps a small claim suite could be brought against the sellers and would my agent like to offer them the $150.00 fee for filing it?  She readily agreed and by doing this she hopes to get the monkey off her back and on to the judge.  Frankly, I have no idea what is ethically right in this situation, any feed back, ACTIVE RAIN?????  We need to resolve the case of the ACTIVE MOLD.....

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