Unbelievable (sort of OT)

[Rich Toscano]

[quote=briansd1]Did you not notice that, since I started responding tit-for-tat, the rants from the other side have stopped.[/quote]

No… they “stopped” because I just delete them now when I see them. As I recall it, your “tit for tat” responses only fueled the flame(war)s and made the problem worse. (That said, I do appreciate that you’ve stopped instigating things yourself).

[Rich Toscano]

PS to Dan… I lol’d at Wolfram and Hart. Nice callback.

[urbanrealtor]

New one:
I have a couple trying to buy in Del Cerro.
They have looked at a lot of stuff and made a few (but only a few) offers.
Only one was accepted and seemed like it would work.
The seller accepted our offer and we opened escrow.
Our offer specified 17 days for investigation contingencies and the entire escrow for lending contingencies.
That means you have 17 calendar days after acceptance to investigate, inspect, and review disclosures.
If a new disclosure is made, then there is a minimum 5 day contingency period after that disclosure.
Also, the contingency removal is active.
That means that the buyer has to sign a piece of paper saying “I remove contingencies” before his deposit is in jeopardy.

So here is what happened:
On day 9 of escrow, the buyer was at a party with a friend who works at SD USD’s administration office.
This friend commented that he should not be moving to that location because it is across the street from a school scheduled to be closed.
The buyer did some research and confirmed with the district that the school was under consideration for closure.
He advised me of this on day 11 and canceled escrow.
I submitted the cancellation notice to the listing agent on day 12.
The listing agent (who is very well-known up there) called me and stated that this school was not on the list to be closed and that he had confirmed same.
Thats not the problem.
That would have actually been really good (had it been definitive and confirmable).
However, he then went on to say that since he had information contradicting our reason for cancellation, therefore the cancellation in bad faith and the deposit was forfeit.
I tried to research this issue directly with the district and was advised that they could not confirm that this school would close but that many schools in the area would be closing and they would have to wait and see.
The buyer was unimpressed (as I would be) with this maybe-we’re-going-to-close-the-school thing and declined to rescind his cancellation.

So now the buyer is small-claiming the seller and his agent for the amount of the deposit and then some.

To me this is unbelievable because the whole point of an investigation period is for confirming the property meets your requirements.

Almost any reason (including not liking the neighbors dog) are valid reasons to back out.

I am just astounded (more irritated really than surprised) to see a known agent act in such a way.

[Coronita]

[quote=urbanrealtor]New one:
I have a couple trying to buy in Del Cerro.
They have looked at a lot of stuff and made a few (but only a few) offers.
Only one was accepted and seemed like it would work.
The seller accepted our offer and we opened escrow.
Our offer specified 17 days for investigation contingencies and the entire escrow for lending contingencies.
That means you have 17 calendar days after acceptance to investigate, inspect, and review disclosures.
If a new disclosure is made, then there is a minimum 5 day contingency period after that disclosure.
Also, the contingency removal is active.
That means that the buyer has to sign a piece of paper saying “I remove contingencies” before his deposit is in jeopardy.

So here is what happened:
On day 9 of escrow, the buyer was at a party with a friend who works at SD USD’s administration office.
This friend commented that he should not be moving to that location because it is across the street from a school scheduled to be closed.
The buyer did some research and confirmed with the district that the school was under consideration for closure.
He advised me of this on day 11 and canceled escrow.
I submitted the cancellation notice to the listing agent on day 12.
The listing agent (who is very well-known up there) called me and stated that this school was not on the list to be closed and that he had confirmed same.
Thats not the problem.
That would have actually been really good (had it been definitive and confirmable).
However, he then went on to say that since he had information contradicting our reason for cancellation, therefore the cancellation in bad faith and the deposit was forfeit.
I tried to research this issue directly with the district and was advised that they could not confirm that this school would close but that many schools in the area would be closing and they would have to wait and see.
The buyer was unimpressed (as I would be) with this maybe-we’re-going-to-close-the-school thing and declined to rescind his cancellation.

So now the buyer is small-claiming the seller and his agent for the amount of the deposit and then some.

To me this is unbelievable because the whole point of an investigation period is for confirming the property meets your requirements.

Almost any reason (including not liking the neighbors dog) are valid reasons to back out.

I am just astounded (more irritated really than surprised) to see a known agent act in such a way.[/quote]

I thought the entire 17 days period was for any reason…

[urbanrealtor]

Pretty much anything other than “I just changed my mind”.

[SD Realtor]

Wow that is a doozy. Even if the school stays open it seems like your client can say he is concerned about the school closing in the future given the current budget issues. Has your broker called the listing broker? Seems like a very frivolous situation.

[urbanrealtor]

[quote=SD Realtor]Wow that is a doozy. Even if the school stays open it seems like your client can say he is concerned about the school closing in the future given the current budget issues. Has your broker called the listing broker? Seems like a very frivolous situation.[/quote]

I am the broker.
So is he.

[lookingagain]

I’d like to take this opportunity to vent on one of my latest RE transactions. Last year my wife and I put a offer on a short sale (we ended up buying the place). We put in an offer of 925K for the house and there were three loans on the property, the first with B of A and two others with a second bank. I should have known that there would be problems as the home had fallen out of escrow three times IIRC.

After three months, the sellers realtor gets back to us and says that B of A is countering at 934K for the home. When we sit down to go over the transaction, I notice that B of A is getting 898K there is 27K going to the bank holding the second and third and 9K as a “refund to the seller”. When I ask what this refund was, she said not to worry about it and it was always in the contracts. I said no it is not, to which she replied that she is the agent and knows better than I what is in real estate contracts. She goes on to “explain” that since this is not the official accounting (what ever that form is called) they just lump all the expected costs into one line item and that these costs are going to be paid by B of A.

(all this time our agent is doing everything she can to control her anger)

Knowing that something was amiss, I asked to see all the correspondence between her and the banks. At first she said that it was impossible because all the electronic communication (e-mail and the banks short sale system) is deleted as soon it is closed after she reads it. I tell her BS, and the next day I get a whole bunch of electronic communications between her and the banks. It took me about 15 minutes to find out that at the time she submitted our offer to B of A, she told the holder of the other two notes that they will get 36K (the amount they settled for in the last attempt but still about 6% of what they are owed). When B of A finally got back to her, they had accepted our offer and were going to pay the other bank 27K.

AFTER hearing from B of A (based on the e-mail time stamps) she sent an e-mail to the other bank with “Great news”, B of A as agreed to give them the 36K for the loans, knowing full well this was not true. Her plan was to try to hide the extra 9K as some sort of fees or something that we would have to pay for.

We called her on this, and said that she has lied to us, our realtor and the banks involved with this transaction. She got very indignant and stated that she has never done anything unethical in her life, and that we were not smart enough to understand how real estate transactions work. She went on and on about how complicated these things are and how you can’t just “add up the numbers” in the transactions so we had just better do what she says since she knows best.

Well, we wanted the house and our agent suggested that we just split the 9K three ways. So that is what we did and I just kept quiet as possible for the rest of the transaction.

The Worst part is that she now lives three houses away from us!

I know that there are good, honest realtors out there (ours has always done a great job for us) but it is incompetent and dishonest prople like this that give the whole profession it’s bad reputation.

Thanks for letting me finally vent this.

R

[SD Realtor]

YR that is sad to see the seller is going to want to go through the court system. That is pretty lame.

R – another good example of an agent behaving badly. Possibly a conversation with the broker of that agent is a good idea so that the agent will stop the bad habits?

[urbanrealtor]

la/r:
It was foolish of the agent not to be upfront with everything from the beginning.

Its really impressive how dumb agents can be by being secretive.

If she had just said: “here are the numbers we need to reach to have an acceptable short sale” (which she obviously had in mind), she probably could have foregone all that bullshit.

If you had an objection to a seller kick out, you could have walked away then.

Instead this turned into a dumb game where she shows you the communication logs (which I would not do) and you decide if you can deal with the bullshit.

Not cool.

[Anonymous]

Hi folks, this is related to the FC stuff that came up above, and I didn’t want to start a new thread (since, near as I can tell, all Piggs read all posts anyway).

I left SD a couple years ago, and moved up to the bay area. But still spend time on this site, of course. We rented while deciding if we picked the right area.

Fast forward, our LL lost the house to FC. Happens all the time. Chase owns it. They have spent the last ~60 days “reviewing our lease”, which included the Notice to Vacate hiccough (to which we replied appropriately and in a timely manner).

We’ve been escrowing rent, in a separate account. We’d actually like to _buy_ the place so we can stay in the area, which is a whole separate topic.

My question is this – when they do finally present us with a replacement lease, and tell us where to pay rent, do we have to pay rent in arrears? I’m all prepared for that, and not unwilling to do so, but I’m also grumpy that they have been so lame in offering us a replacement lease that I’d happily keep all that rent money. And penalize them for their inability to process the lease more quickly.

Anyone know how this will all actually unfold and if I’m truly on the hook for the rent in the interim period between old lease and new?

Thanks a ton for any and all insights / experience / knowledge.

Cheers,
Scott

[Author]

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