Negotiating As-Is Contract after Inspections

[LisaCola]

Originally Posted by dandarc

I do appreciate all of the feedback. What all this boils down to is that we disagree with the seller as to the value of this house. Being about 10K apart on a 120-140K house is pretty far apart, I think. If they find another buyer who is closer to their number, more power to em. If not and we're still looking in a few months, and that house is available (I think it will be), who knows what might happen.

I know it is hard to really say what the market value is on a particular house, but when a house down the same street that is 400 square feet (30%) bigger, has a 2 car vs 1 car garage, and is on a better maintained lot and in better condition (already has the new roof) is listed at a lower price, it makes me think perhaps we chose the house with owners that didn't really want to sell.

Too bad we decided that one was too big for us - we chose the smaller one deliberately, knowing that we would not be paying the asking price. We did not see the extent of the wood rot, the state of the trees, or the wood-decay fungus in the crawl space or our initial offer would have been lower in the first place and rejected outright and we would not have wasted so much time on this house.

Lesson learned on this - if the deal becomes "As-Is", assume the repairs are going to be at least double what my eye tells me and proceed from there.

Consider yourself lucky. We had a similar situation on a historic house we fell in love with a few years ago. It was an as-is estate sell, and we knew we needed a construction loan for updates and obvious repairs needed. We made a lower offer based on our own inspection of the house, and it was accepted. Then the inspection turned up asbestos tile, siding and insulation; improper ceiling height and egress on an attic addition; buried fuel tank; and more. Our construction loan would have barely addressed all the safety issues, leaving us nothing for updates and other repairs. We amended our offer to request a further reduce in the sale price, and in the meantime another buyer came along and offered more than we did. The estate didn't "like" the other buyer and really wanted to sell to us somewhere in between the two prices, but we had an out and we took it, and boy were we glad we did.

It just wasn't the right time for us to sink every spare minute, dollar and bit of energy we had into that house, and we ended up buying another home a month later. Every time we drive by that other house, we laugh and thank our lucky stars that things turned out the way they did. Now that house is in foreclosure, while we've been very happy in the house that ended up becoming our home.