Sellers | Love's Real Stories

October 30, 2014

Boo

“Now set yourself down right here, honey, and I’ll get you some juice and cookies,” said this bent little lady. The floorboards creaked as she shuffled away. I admired the room I occupied, the dining room. Its woodwork, plaster walls and high-domed plaster ceiling embodied old-world craftsmanship. I wondered when the house was built. Turn of the century, maybe.

“Nineteen and fifteen,” said the lady. I jumped an inch off my chair; I hadn’t seen her return.

“My daddy built this house in nineteen and fifteen,” she said. She told me her father milled the lumber from rough to finish and built the windows and doors himself.

“Now let’s get down to business,” she said.

I spread out my market analysis paperwork. The lady sat across the table from me and stared directly at my face, unblinking. Upon my conclusion: silence. I looked around the room and flinched at the sight of a cat eyeballing me, unblinking, from a chair in the corner. My knee twitched.

“I’ll ask Mama,” she announced, and shuffled away down the hall.

Mama must be up there in years, I thought, this lady had to be in her eighth or ninth decade.

“Mama says you’ll do,” she said. “We’re ready to get to selling.”

I asked if her mother needed to sign the listing documents.

“Hee hee hee,” she wheezed, “Mama’s been dead 20 years and more.” She stopped smiling and whispered, “But Mama visits.”

Next morning I called the California Association of Realtors Legal Hotline. “Do I need to disclose a ghost?” I asked.

“Hearsay and anecdotal comments regarding the existence of the paranormal are not within the legal guidelines of disclosure obligations,” said the attorney. “However, if your client believes apparitions of the supernatural exist upon the premises, it may be prudent for you to disclose that belief, in the event a buyer has a pre-conditioned abhorrence to such phantasm.”

I visited the little lady. “Listen,” I said, “I think we need to disclose your mother’s visits.”

She laughed and wheezed. “Don’t worry, honey,” she said, “Mama’s coming with me, and we ain’t a-coming back.”

“Oh, uh, okay,” I said. “By the way, the cat is going with you, too, right?”

“Cat? Honey, I haven’t had a cat for 20 years and more.”

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September 13, 2014

Not For Sale

I caught sight of this kid crawling through the weeds at the back of this property I was listing. Her red hair gave her away, contrasted among the yellow weeds. She disappeared.

“Is that Flora way back there?” I asked Mrs. Hart.

Mrs. Hart pulled on her cigarette. “Oh probably,” she said. “That kid’s in a world of her own. Tell her to come in, will ya?”

I walked toward the back of the one-acre lot through knee-high dry weeds on a narrow path that ended at a scrub of manzanita brush in front of a stand of sycamore trees. The path pointed to an opening in the brush big enough for a small dog or maybe a skinny kid.

I forced my way on hands and knees through the scratchy manzanita into a hidden and lush little oasis walled by the brush and the back fence, and domed by the sycamores. The centerpiece of this secret garden was a rusted hose-bib atop a stand-pipe about three feet tall. Beads of water dripped slowly from the hose-bib into a shallow pool surrounding the base of the stand-pipe. The place was a tiny green paradise surrounded by dry fields.

Flora Hart sat cross-legged beside the pool with her beagle dog, Buddy, lying at her side. She looked sad, and didn’t acknowledge my arrival in her secret world.

I had met nine-year-old Flora the day before. I felt bad when her dad yelled at her for objecting to the sale of their house. Her dad signed the listing agreement. Flora gave us the stink-eye.

This day I smiled at her and said, “Quite a place you have here.”

“Shhh,” she said. I realized we weren’t alone. A train of thumb-sized bright green frogs lined the stand-pipe from the pool to the hose-bib. Yellow-jackets zoomed aggressively about, and drank from the mouth of the dripping hose-bib. A skinny green snake slithered on the ground inches from Flora’s feet.

Flora was apparently unfazed by the threat of yellow-jackets and the snake, and sat calmly like a monk.

Orange and black butterflies were parked around the edge of the pool, sporadically flying about. A pair of quail ran under the back fence; songbirds flitted in the field beyond, occasionally landing on the fence-top.

“Wow. Quite a place,” I said quietly.

Flora, with butterflies in her hair and a frog in the palm of each hand, narrowed her eyes.

“Too bad for you,” she said, “it’s not for sale.”

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September 5, 2014

A Few Words

Mr. Williams, the seller of a country ranchette on the outskirts of town, pounced on my Buyer and me.

“Hey, how ya’ll doin’ come on in and have a look around I was just gettin the rider mower tuned up out there in the shop it’s a beauty the shop I mean but the mower’s a good little number too it runs like there’s no tomorrow and I use it for all kinds of stuff what with this place being so big and all and private too anyway like I was sayin that shop’s a beauty with 220 power and you-name-it because when we built this place it was a no-holds-barred kind of a deal as far as I was concerned you know when the contractor asked if I wanted this or that I said just make it the best and I’m talkin the whole Mary Ann not just the shop I’m talkin the house and everything like this open-beamed ceiling right here those aren’t toothpicks up there those are four-by-twelve laminated beams engineered for span all the way up to that ridge beam which is nineteen-and-a-half feet in the air from the floor we’re standing on so you from around here?”

Later, I asked my buyer, Mr. Lansing, how he liked the property. Mr. Lansing was a man a few words.

“Well, I have a few questions,” he said.

I called the Listing Agent. I was tempted to ask her how in the world she could ever manage to get a word in edgewise with her seller, but instead I told her my buyer had a few questions, and that we had met her seller, Mr. Will-

“Oh that’s wonderful,” she said, “and I’m glad you got to meet Mr. Williams who is just a great guy not to mention a wealth of information about the property which he is so proud of and rightfully so because it was built with such quality and oh my goodness I hope you got to meet Mrs. Williams just a sweetheart of a lady and the both of them are so nice and a pleasure to work with I just feel so fortunate to have them as clients and I know they’ll be conscientious sellers and there won’t be many repairs to negotiate because the place is so well-maintained and Mr. Williams is always willing to do whatever it takes to make things right like he’s already done all the extras I recommended for preparing for selling so what are your questions?”

Mr. Lansing bought that property without having too say much at all.

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August 8, 2014

Tell All

“Buyer Beware” is now “Seller Declare” in the world of Real Estate disclosure. The legal duty for disclosure by sellers has evolved to a point just short of a requirement for taking a lie detector test. Sellers now must provide buyers with a completed stack of disclosure forms that rivals the size of a telephone book.

In the old days, sellers could sit back while their buyers crawled over, under, around, and through a property searching for defects. Sellers had no obligation to offer information about the condition of their property, and they usually didn’t. It wasn’t a matter of dishonesty by sellers; it was simply the rules of the road. For buyers there was no map.

Of course, most people are honest, and many sellers did volunteer well-meaning clues such as, “My wife’s uncle built the family room addition. He knows all the codes and the like”; or “That crack in the foundation hasn’t given us any problems since we shored it up with bricks.”

Unfortunately, there were the more devious sellers. Buried tanks, looney neighbors, property line encroachments, and you-name-it, litter the landscape of the old world of non-disclosure.

The landmark case that opened up the new territory of disclosure was in 1984:

The Eastons sued the Strassburgers after the home they bought in Diablo, Ca. sank into the landfill portion of their property which they were not told about. It turns out the Strassburgers had twice filled a 10 foot deep sinkhole on the property.

The Eastons won, and legislators started drafting up new rules of the road. In 1987, it became California Law for sellers to fill out the Real Estate Transfer Disclosure Statement, answering specific questions about the condition of their properties.

We’ve come a long way since then. Sellers are now on the hot seat for an immense array of disclosure requirements. And it’s not always clear what should or shouldn’t be disclosed. (Just how much of a pain in the neck is that neighbor? Is the water at the side of the house during the rainy season a big deal? )

The usual advice is for sellers to err on the side of over-disclosing. It can be a memory-test, but so far, there is no requirement for a lie detector test.

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May 2, 2014

Real Short

“People have been going through hard times and I feel kind of guilty that we lucked out,” said Jena Scott. “The house we bought just a year and a half ago for $180,000 is now worth $260,000. Our Realtor says he hasn’t seen anyone else come out so far ahead so quickly.”

Jena shrugged her shoulders. “We just got so lucky,” she said.

It wasn’t all luck. Ron and Linda Jameson, the sellers of the house, were going through hard times. “I was down so long it looked like up to me,” said Ron Jameson. Ron is a building contractor and was hit hard by the economic crash.

“We bought when the market was swinging and my business was rolling, he said. “I put a bunch of remodel work into that house right outta the chute, but everything dumped right after,” he said.

Ron and Linda were selling via a short sale and would receive nothing from the sale, no matter who bought it or how much they paid. So, they could choose their buyer. They chose Jena and Jack.

“We chose the Scotts because we liked them,” said Linda. “We passed up an all-cash buyer who would have been more of a slam-dunk, but we wanted to give the Scotts a chance though they were first-time buyers with the possibility of loan difficulties.”

As it turned out, there was loan difficulty. The appraiser for the Scott’s lender turned in a low appraisal, $20,000 less than the sales price. The appraiser wouldn’t give value to Ron’s unfinished remodel work.

“It was all good work,” said Ron, “but I ran out of money and time before I reached the finish line.”

A low appraisal, especially $20,000 low, is typically a death blow to a sale. Banks won’t usually approve a short sale at that kind of discount. Cash buyers were on the sidelines waiting to jump in when this sale died, but the bank ignored common sense and didn’t look at any other offers.

“Through some kind of glitch in the red-tape process, the short sale was approved. Real short,” said Jack Scott.

The Jamesons were okay with it because they got nothing anyway. “We were just glad to have our loan debt forgiven,” said Linda Jameson.

“We bought way below value,” said Jena Scott, shrugging her shoulders. I’m so glad the Jamesons were our sellers.

That’s lucky.

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