I thought the customer was always right???

It seems that buying a house is not as easy as the news would have you think. My experiences have been mostly rude people making absurd demands and then trying to beat me (one special person I think would have liked to physically) into submission. I have never experienced a more consumer unfriendly market in my life! Obviously, with such high value purchases, all parties want the deal to be favorable to themselves and equitable at worst so when dealing with a seller you should expect some creative dealings, but outright rudeness? Well, here is the saga of me buying a house, which I did but lost 🙁

Sometime in May, Theresa and I were out looking at mattresses down in Apex. The one I have now has lost all springy-ness (unless you consider feeling springs in your back springy) and have had it since I was 11-ish (13 years). On the way home I saw a sign for new town homes and thought it might be interesting to drive through and see what was being offered. The homes were nice enough and there was a website listed so we went home and checked out the site. We weren’t too impressed with what was being offered for the price so Theresa asked me if I wanted her to look around at other properties. I told her “sure”, but I wasn’t very serious about buying anything just yet. Well, the next day when I got home from work, she had already contacted a Realtor (who we’ll call Bob) and Bob had already sent us some listings. Theresa, being pretty excited, wanted to go look at some properties that weekend. For the moment I was happy to play along and we looked at some listings from what Bob sent us and some others we found online. Friday night we went to look at a few on our own to try and decide some preferences early. As an anecdote, it seems there is a magic like in Apex that once you go south of everything turns to crime ridden (or so it looks) slums… it was frightening… and quite visible. We narrowed the list down to just 3 that we wanted Bob to show us. And so it began…

We ended up liking one of the floor plans a lot and one of the town homes with it was priced “ok”, but had a lot of problems. The walls were in terrible shape. Huge peg sized holes were in a few places, drywall tape was coming off in a couple places, the linoleum floors in the kitchen and one of the bathrooms and some serious deformities, and one of the rooms was painted a blinding, annoying neon orange. Out of curiosity, we asked Bob to get the financial information on the house and find out everything about the property he could. After a few days, we got the mortgage info and learned that after the current owner had moved out (and out of state it would seem) a pipe in one of the bathrooms had burst and been left for more than a few days damaging the floor and the ceiling below. So, Theresa and I thought about it for a week or so and I convinced myself that it was worth trying. We took the asking price of the house and subtracted the real value of all the repairs we thought were necessary (don’t bother doing this if you try to buy a house, nobody will give a damn) then $5k more for negotiating room. Two weeks after we looked at the house, we decided to go look one more time before I made an official offer. We noticed some exterior damage, which we noted must be fixed before closing, but made the offer. Later that night, we got a response… The owner stuck with asking price but would allow for a “paint allowance”… we understood why the house had been on the market for 5 months.

I wasn’t discouraged by this experience at all really, so we continued on with Bob looking at more properties. We probably looked at a dozen or so before we found a town house that had everything in it Theresa and I wanted. It was a new build and the price seemed a little inflated so I concocted a scheme that I thought the builder might go for: offer close to his asking price with a high amount back for closing costs/buy down (in my case, I initially asked for 6%, the max allowable by FHA). The builder returned with his asking price, but $3k in closing… not a lot of movement. So, I split the difference in our prices and reduced my closing costs. He returned again with his asking price and $4500 in closing… So I walked away for a couple weeks and tried to have Bob find some more information about it. We didn’t get much, so I offered again and he came back with the same price but $6000 in closing. Again I split the difference in price and this time met him with closing costs… and he refused. After the 4th (of July), we were finally able to get some of the sales data about the units we were looking at. It turns out, the builder sold 4 of the units I was looking at for an average price of $10k less than I was offering. That news was kind of depressing because I was just about to say fine and pay what the builder was asking, but now I couldn’t let myself be in a $10k deficit to the other homes around me. In a last ditch effort, I made another offer, on a different unit ($5k less base price) and this time we showed them their own sales data… the builder refused and said he thinks he can command the price he’s asking.

Theresa and I gave up on this for a while and asked Bob to show us some more properties. Unfortunately, we kinda held them all against the home we really liked and just wouldn’t settle for anything else. So, at the end of July, we reevaluated the options and upgrades we wanted in the house and remade an offer. This time, we got a different response, the builder wanted to know what I wanted to spend the $6000 in incentives on. We told him closing costs and buy down and he gave us the same asking price he’d been asking all along but gave us the closing costs we wanted. We went back and fourth a few times, but we finally settled on his price, as long as he would make some modifications to the floor plan at no cost. So, the day before I was supposed to leave for QuakeCon, Bob and Theresa came to Cisco and we worked out the contract. Our goal was to use the standard NC Realty contract since the builder’s was a one sided, 1 page POS (seriously, the contract actually said that after 30 days I lose my earnest money no matter what). Off Theresa and Bob went to try and work out the details and to pick basic options, and the builder rudely informed Bob that he will only accept his own contract and will not make any modifications — but in the same breath asked what modifications I wanted. So Saturday afternoon, after my drive to OH, Bob asks for a list of essential modifications to the contract so he can try to negotiate some terms. It basically came down to just a few things
– At the time, we were told expected completion was the end of Oct. so I needed a rate contingency
– I wanted to use any lender I wanted
– The paragraph stating I loose my earnest money after 30 days needed to be clarified to say that that statement only applied to lending approval
– We needed clarification on their arbitration process since the contract forced me to give up any right to sue the builder
– There was actually one more that I don’t remember and am too lazy to look up
On Monday, the builder flatly rejected anything of the sort and I find out that Bob is angry with me because I put a change in the original contract that was partly to spite the builder (for all the annoyances he had been causing)… which it turns out the builder never read…

So… Tuesday… the day I arrived in Dallas for QuakeCon… after going on maybe 1 hours of sleep the night before, Bob sends me an email (a freaking email!) saying that the builder will clarify the statements in the contract and that completion is actually in Sept. so a 60 rate lock at the bank should work. Great! I should get the contract on Tuesday night, oh, but, by the way, the builder wants it all back by EOB Wednesday… I’m in Dallas… at a convention… how the hell am I supposed to receive the contract… No worries, the convention center had a business center, I can print it off there in the morning. Wednesday morning I go into the business center and find out there is no reasonable way to access my email except a $.50 per minute internet connection with seeming no printer (I later found that in my severe lack of sleep I just missed it, but it was $1 per page… go back and read that again, there is no decimal). They wouldn’t even take my thumb drive and print it off for me from the half dozen printers in the God forsaken place! Bob and Theresa figure out that they can fax to the business center there. Bob sends me the fax and I get it with a $10 bill. Holy ****? Apparently its $1/pg + tax… I also noticed that it would cost me almost $20 to fax it out… I asked if that applied to an 800 number… of course it does.

After looking over the contract, I notice the that rate contingency isn’t there… without sleep I never made the connection that by pulling in the completion date and being able to get a rate lock at the bank, the builder thought that satisfied my concern about lending rates. I called the lender I’ve been working with and he tells me he need the signed contract to get the rate lock which puts me in an awful catch-22 (now I feel like driving off a cliff). I called Bob to tell him this and he gets angry with me and nearly yells at me telling me he’s bent over backwards to get this deal together and he knows there is a way to get the rate lock and he clearly wants me to just sign it with no protections for myself — he then complained to Theresa that I wasn’t willing to take time away from my convention to do this deal. After that little talk, I called the bank again and the lender tells me he actually can do it without the contract, he just needs the real home address… and $600 (towards no refundable “fees”)… and text message my CC info to him… and I have to agree to the lending terms and conditions over the phone… at this point I pretty much just want to go hang myself in the bathroom. I came damn close to just getting the lock so this whole thing was over, but decided the risk was too much and manually wrote in a 10 day rate contingency in the contract, signed it, and made the business center fax it for free. Two hours later Bob sends me text asking if I’d faxed the contract. FML! The business center enterd the first 3 numbers of the phone number twice, which I can’t understand. BTW… all of this was going on while I was trying to do setup for QuakeCon… pity, lots of it, needs to come my way.

Surprisingly, the builder accepted… but we weren’t done yet. Apparently, according to NC law the contract isn’t valid unless I give them a check for the earnest money… from Dallas… Bob wanted me to overnight a check (from a checkbook I didn’t have) to him (at the business center’s rates) or do a wire transfer (from a bank I couldn’t get to) to the builder. I was at my whits end. I stalled the whole friggin’ day (Thursday, if you weren’t keeping track) until I made the decision to make no decision. I felt like I was being rushed from deadline to deadline and not being given any chance to make reasonable decisions. Thursday night, Theresa and I decided that she would do the wire transfer in the morning and that I would write her a check when I got back to OH… and it would finally be done.

… But it wasn’t…

Monday night, just after we got back from Dallas, I got another EMAIL!!!!!!!!!!!! from Bob saying the builder couldn’t honor the cabinet and counter top options Theresa had chosen (with my permission). The builder had apparently misjudged the stage of construction and the default choices had already been installed. My choices were to just keep it, move my contract to another house (either one in progress where the choices had already been made or one they hadn’t started yet with completion at the end of Nov.), or get out. I told Bob I needed to look at it before I made a decision. Tuesday morning, Bob had sent me an email saying the builder told Bob I had until EOB Tuesday… I told Bob, privately, this seemed a lot like fraud (the misrepresentation of the builder’s homes, etc), which sent Bob into a fit basically saying he couldn’t work with someone throwing around accusations like that. W/E. I’ve had 20 hours of sleep in 7 days… bite me. And by the way, call me if anything important comes up. Of course he sends me 2 more emails during the day, one of which was the permission I needed to enter the property to make my decision. So Tuesday night, I get there and walk through the property and the floor plan mod hadn’t been done and the extra wiring I contracted for wasn’t done (and the house was dry wall complete)… suffice it to say, I exited the contract.