For Sale By Owner: Why I Woke Up Screaming?

November 14th, 2007 categories: Down to Earth Information

715803_dreaming The second home my husband and I owned was in Roscoe, Illinois and we bought it from a “for sale by owner”.

Funny, the things we think about in our deep sleep. I had completely forgotten about this house we bought years ago. By the time the sun reached my bedroom window, and I was fully awake, all these events had come rushing back at me. Since then I have become a real estate agent. I rose out of bed with a sense of awe and amazement!! I now realized how close we had come to a real estate nightmare.

These are the things I now know and shiver to think about.

No One Was Promoting or Protecting Our Best Interest:

No One Talked About The Price:

I’m not sure how we agreed upon the price. No one did a comparative market analysis for us to see if the house was priced fairly or not. No one negotiated a better price or terms for us. The seller used to be a real estate agent, and I bet he knew just want he was doing.

We did realize a gain when we sold the property 10 years later (most people did) and we were happy with our purchase or blindly blissful.

No Inspection Was Done:

My Dad did walk through the house, but no one encouraged us to get a professional inspection. We did have to replace a sump pump right off the bat, but that probably wouldn’t have been found on the inspection anyways…

The odd thing is the people who bought it from us were so anxious they offered to buy our house without an inspection contingency. (The difference being they choose to do the inspection later and live with the results)

No Water Test Was Done:

We did have quite a time with this later. The seal on the well cap had decayed and bugs had festered in the casing. It cost us plenty to clean this up, but again I think this happened after we owned it, but who knows?

No Septic Inspection Was Done:

I don’t know how we got talked into this one, but we were young and not experienced at all with buying country property. We did this step after we moved in. Septic systems can be very expensive things to correct. Luckily nothing seriously wrong here either.

We allowed the sellers to rent back while their house was being built.

Normally this is an OK thing to do, because you have a final walk through to make sure they kept the house in good repair, but again, we did not have this privilege. We had no one protecting our best interest. Even if we had found something damaged, without that initial inspection how would we prove that wasn’t the way it was in the first place? Once again, everything was in good order when we moved in.

Possession Problems:

The move in date kept being pushed back because of delays with the build job.(I found out later the seller did most of the finish work and he was the reason why it didn’t get done on time.) Again no one represented our best interest! We just keep imposing on the kind folks that let us rent a room for the duration.

No Warranty was Offered

This may have paid for itself when the sump pump went out, but that was the only thing that we would have used it for.(Again lucky!)

Conditions on the Purchase and Sale Agreement were never met.

The promise to finish painting the house was never kept. He did leave the paint for us (how sweet of him). We were so anxious to move in, we did not hold him to this agreement, but also we did not get reimbursed for it either.

In retrospect, we may not have ended up in that wonderful neighborhood if we would not have stopped to inquire on this property.

We did not know the seller would have probably paid a real estate agent to bring a buyer to the table. We could’ve had someone looking out for our best interest and it would not have cost us anything.

Not until years later, when I became older and wiser, did I realize how very, very lucky we were.