Tuesday, August 3, 2010

It's only money. Right?

We finally received the close-out report from our lawyer, who handled the sale of our tiny house and purchase of our current house.

Bad news: the lawyer paid the seller an extra $10,000 on the purchase of this house. Fortunately, we have documents (the same ones he had!) so we should be able to recupe that money.

Worse news: upon discovering vermiculite in the attic, our realtor called the selling realtor, who then called the vendor with our proposal to reduce the selling price by $10,000. The vendor wasn't happy, but he agreed. Somehow, that change NEVER MADE IT INTO THE CONTRACT! Fools that we are, we signed the documents we were given, without checking that the $10,000 reduction was included. And, with so much money - huge hunks of cash - flying around, we didn't spot the error ourselves until now.

At this point, we probably have no recourse, except that we've contacted the realtor and, if the company is ethical (and believes in keeping the customer happy), they may reimburse us that $10,000. But, since we signed the papers, they could very well push all responsibility back onto our shoulders.

In the meantime, we're feeling pretty cheesed with our lawyer, our realtor and ourselves.

4 comments:

  1. Oh no! Definitely blame the lawyer for not doing his bit. His job is to protect the frazzled homeowners, I would think.

    The good news (hopefully): Not all vermiculite has asbestos in it. So you might actually be OK??

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  2. Oh yeah, that lawyer will have to clean up his mess, for sure.

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  3. Oh, and the previous owner did have test results that showed no vermiculite, but apparently he only tested three samples. Our realtor told us about someone else who tested six samples and found asbestos in only one or two samples. Apparently, they frequently used vermiculite from disparate locations in a single attic, so it's really almost impossible to ensure that a space is asbestos-free.

    ReplyDelete

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