HUD Pays Very Little For Vandalism
My client has a HUD owned house under contract.
Of course, the house is being sold as is.
It is almost in livable condition, but it does not impact the purchase because he is paying cash.
But then, along come the copper thieves. Apparently the price of copper is relatively high, which encourages useless animals to make a living by stealing copper from houses which are not their own and then selling it.
However the issue is with HUD.
The HUD contracts are written such that the buyer will take the house in its as is condition even if something happens to the house after the contract is ratified. It even seems that the buyer could lose the earnest money deposit if they were to back out of the contract because of vandalism.
HUD is not all bad though, they will send someone out to the house to evaluate the damage and then propose a credit. In the case of something like stolen copper pipes, first, they will estimate the replacement cost with plastic rather than copper, which is okay, but they will not include the cost of labor required to reinstall the pipes. In this particular case, where almost all of the supply pipes were removed, they proposed a credit of $270.00.
Why don't they cover the cost of labor? It's their policy
In fact, they have a policy which limits the amount for a credit to ten percent of the purchase price.
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