Safe as houses

Today I was to have closed on a condo/townhouse in Seattle. Instead, my realtor & I will be headed out looking at a new list of properties in the Emerald City.

I found out Tuesday that my lender wouldn’t approve the loan—not because of my credit rating or anything like that, but because the condo association doesn’t meet new federal requirements for underwriting loans.

Seems that if you have more than 10% of the units owned by a single person, that’s an impediment. & if more than 25% of the units are devoted to commercial use, that’s another. In this building of six units, two are commercial space, & they’re owned by the same person. Plus—one of the residential owners is eight months in arrears in his homeowner’s dues.

So, as about 99.67% of all I own is currently in cartons in expectation of moving on Monday, I was a bit stunned. There was no intimation that there’d be any problem, but when the appraisal came back it apparently triggered some mechanism that stopped everything until the HOA confirmed that, yes, one person owned the two commercial units. & there’s a deadbeat amongst the owners.

At that point it just ground to a halt.

The thing is, this means that no owner in that building can sell the property if the buyer has to get a loan adhering to these restrictions. As my loan officer explained to me, even if they’d managed to get me an exception so I could buy this place, when time came to sell, I couldn’t for exactly the same reasons.

So I spent Tuesday afternoon cancelling the movers & all the utilities & services for the new place, as well as cancelling the cancellations for utilities & services at the Rambler. (The Brotherhood, to give them credit, were fine with me announcing that instead of moving out as of 30 April, I’m staying on.)

Interestingly, in talking with utility companies in Seattle, I discovered that the seller had told them to start billing me as of Monday, 21 April. That would be four days before the actual, you know, close date.

Can you say, “petty”? I knew you could. (She’d been like that on items in the inspection report, too. That house was on the market since July of last year, mine was the first offer she received, she accepts it within 37 minutes & then starts niggling on inspection items?)

I left it to my agent to inform the seller-side of the situation.

But the saga doesn’t end there because Wednesday morning the seller’s agent started on some sort of unilateral rampage, evidently under the impression that whales needed saving & she was going to do it.

Here’s the first email, addressed to the appraisal company & copied to my agent & me:

“Dear Nate,
“The buyer was rejected for the loan on this condo and we are trying to resolve this. However, the lender seems to have lost your appraisal and won't provide it to the buyer. Can you email the Buyer or her agent or me a copy a.s.a.p. so we can take it to another lender. We were suppose to close on this in 2 days and are now scrambling to find another lender to do it.
“Thanks,
[“Realtor Cow”]

Now, admittedly the inter-agent conversation had been while mine was in her car with a dying mobile phone, so there hadn’t been a lot of explanation as to the reason for the rejected mortgage. Even so, it’s pretty egregious for even a realtor to start demanding private documents to which she’s not entitled & to talk about going to another lender—especially since she doesn’t represent the buyer.

I also love the imperial first-person-plural—like this is some sort of a team effort.

For a seller-side that hadn’t been particularly interested in taking steps that would help move the deal forward before, it’s astonishing how this suddenly became a priority.

But it gets better.

Shortly thereafter Ms. Realtor Cow sent this to my agent:

“CAN YOU SEND ME THE INFORMATION SO I can contact the Lender. We need to find someone else to do the loan. How about the Lender that provided us the pre-approval letter. We should be checking with them. I don't believe this complex isn't lendable and per our contract, the buyer needs to make every attempt to get her loan even if that means with another lender.

“Ask her to contact her Lender and have the appraisal emailed to one of us TODAY. She paid for it, she owns it and they shouldn't be able to keep it.

“Thanks,
“Realtor Cow”

Note the lack of salutation & the shouted first line. (Unless she just can’t figure out how to unlock caps.) Again, the imperial “we”. The implied sense that she alone appears to be on the ball in this situation at the same time imputing a team effort. “We should be checking”, “We need to find someone else”…

Then she starts really getting up my nose: “per our contract, the buyer needs to make every attempt to get her loan even [sic] if that means with another lender.”

Uh, excuse me? Buyer most assuredly does not have to get a loan from any lender she has not chosen & who hasn’t offered her the deal she wants by way of interest rates. Does RC expect me to go to a guy named Guido & pay double-digit APR just to buy this place that no one in the world wanted?

News flash: you don’t represent me, you don’t dictate what I will or won’t do outside the terms of the contract & you don’t try to coerce me into a deal that’s patently not in my interests.

& when the plug has been pulled, the water flows down the drain. So get over it.

(This RC had been practicing minor deceptions throughout, which I put down to lack of attention to detail. Things like citing features in the official MLS listing that didn't in fact exist or weren't in fact included. & in the matter of one of the inspection items, which hadn't been fixed, she had the unmitigated gall to send us a statement for signing agreeing that it had been fixed, with the verbal assurance that it would be. Either she had the impression that I'd been lobotomized, or she just thought she could try it on.)

I’m sure it’s a shock to the petty seller, who now finds the place a permanent millstone round her neck. But the idea that you can jump in & jam it through after it’s been made clear that it’s not going to happen is delusional, even in the goofy world of real estate.

So, I’m back in the old property-hunt saddle again, & have to try to figure out which cartons have enough clothes in them to get me through a few more weeks.

Thank God I hadn’t got round to packing the coffeemaker.