House Of Failure
I haven’t mentioned this on Fosstodon, or really anywhere online, but my wife and I have been in the middle of purchasing a house. The title of this post is more than a little spoilery, but I’ll tell the sordid tale anyway.
So, last week a house showed up in my feeds that I use to monitor for sales in my area. We’ve been on the market for a while, and we’ve looked at easily two dozen houses by this time. The looks of the pictures posted online looked good, and a quick glance at the floor plan on the assessors page showed that it was probably big enough for our needs.
Just a quick aside, but if you have more than two children in the United States, most houses are not tailored to your needs. According to Statista, the average American family consists of 3.13 people. That’s counting parents. I have more children than that.
OK, enough blathering, back to the house.
So, it looked big enough, so we went over and took a look at it. The house looked dated, but serviceable. It was in the upper end of our price range, but still in our range. It was in a great location close to my kids’ various schools. We were pretty excited by it, and decided to finally put in a tentative offer.
Of course, our offer was contingent on a clean inspection. Since we were putting in an offer, we hired a neutral inspector to give the house a look. What he found was….. not great. It looked like the previous owners had been putting bandages on bullet wounds for a long time, and things a normal house needed were in serious disrepair. Such things like, oh, the roof. There were places on the roof where there was literally just bare wood. Of course, you couldn’t see those issues from the ground, so the owner had made no effort at fixing them. Inside the house they’d tried painting over water stains in the ceilings and placed other obstacles in places that seemed to be intentionally covering other areas of concerns. There were issues in the roof, and the ceilings, and the foundation, and the plumbing, and the electrical. As I was listening to the inspector, it seemed like it would have taken him less time to tell us the things that didn’t have damage.
We weren’t really in the market for a fixer-upper, but we were still interested based on the size of the house and the location. They were so good. If the previous owner would compensate for the repairs the house needed, we’d still go for it.
The first thing we did was got a roofer to do an estimate for us. I’m not going to go into detail, but the price of fixing just the roof was in the neighborhood of a small car, and that was only the roof. We priced out a few other things and realized that the price of those repairs were going to be in the neighborhood of a nice car, not the kind with no radio or air conditioning. We sent the inspection to the owner and asked that either the repairs be done prior, or an equivalent amount be taken off the price to compensate for the repairs.
It did not go well.
The owner came back with around half of what the roof would have cost, nothing else. Given, the roof was the most expensive repair, but it was far from the only repair.
We responded to the owner with the minimum we would accept, and waited to see what their response would be.
The owner responded by offering slightly more than they previously had, but still less than just the cost of the roof by itself. We had five days to respond to their offer, but we responded in less than a minute.
NO.
I think the owner thought we were negotiating or something, but that’s not what was going on. They have thousands and thousands of dollars in repairs they need done before the house is livable, and they’re trying to cover them up and leave those repairs to the new owners.
My favorite part of this, despite the hundreds of dollars we spent on the inspection that we’re not going to get back, is that these repairs have been disclosed to the owner of the home, which means they are now legally obligated to disclose them to anybody making an offer on the home. The price of the home is well beyond its worth considering the repairs it requires, so it’s only a matter of time before they’re finding themselves needing to reduce their price. Significantly.
We’ve withdrawn our offer, which honestly I’m kind of depressed about. It was a good sized house in a great location. It could really have worked out for us, if it wasn’t basically falling down under its own weight. That’s just not something I’m willing to pick up. Bad luck I guess. It’s appropriate that this is my 13th entry in the 100DaysToOffload.
Oh well. Back to looking.
Day 13 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.
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