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louislinus

Inspection Advice - Kicking Myself

10 years ago

I am selling my house FSBO. We have a signed purchase agreement with a buyer and are scheduled to close in 2.5 weeks. We are also buying a new house and close on that house the day after we close on the sale of our existing home. Our Buyer does not have a REA. (I wish she had one.) She had an attorney write up the purchase agreement. She also has never bought a house and is doing this without any counsel. ugh.

Buyer had her inspections a week ago. The inspector said that the house needs an entire new roof and that there are structural issues with the foundation.

The house is a 150 years old and in very good condition. The basement is rubble stone (also called fieldstone). It is extremely solid. We have no cracking anywhere in the house. The basement is certainly unusual and only inspectors familiar with homes of this age will understand it. When we bought the house 5 years ago we were also concerned about the basement and had a separate basement inspection. Our inspector, who has 50+ years experience, was very positive about the basement and in fact said that he felt bad taking our money because this house wasn't going anywhere. With regards to the roof, the back part of the house, which is an addition, does need a new roof and I disclosed that when the buyer looked at the house. The rest of the roof looks good. In fact, just 2 months ago I hired someone to get up on the roof and remove some moss and check it out. There were no issues at that time.

Last Tuesday, two days after the general inspection, my buyer came back with a structural engineer and a roofer to look at the roof. I was here but not privvy to their conversation. Buyer did not communicate with me at all after Tuesday's inspections. I finally emailed her Friday to find out how it went. Buyer said that the structural engineer said "The house is so far from being to code that he wouldn't write a report and walked away from the job." I told my buyer that any house over 30 years old would not be to code and that the majority of homes in our town would fall into the same category. I also said that I would very much like to get the basement inspector I used when I bought the house to come look at it and when could she be available to come back and meet with him (at my cost). She did not respond. I finally just called my old inspector (who is now retired but he agreed to come back) and scheduled an inspection for tomorrow. I emailed her again late Friday and said that I had scheduled an inspection for Sunday and would love for her to be there. I also said that I needed to put my mind at ease about this basement issue. (I KNOW there are no issues with the basement.) I asked her to let me know if she was going to be able to make it. Now it's 24 hours later and she has still not answered me.

The stupidest mistake I made was not reading the contingency section of the contract carefully. Her attorney did not specify any timeframe for her to release us from the inspection contingency and I didn't catch it. Basically she can hold us hostage up to closing and can back out any time. In the meantime the seller's of my new house are understandably super annoyed because this is also holding them hostage.

My buyer is a cautious person and does not like to be pressured. I also just like her a lot but I don't know how to tell her that it's not okay to go dark on me when everything is hinging on her. I know that she is not comfortable negotiating. Every concession we've given her has been because I've offered. She hasn't asked for anything. The concessions I've offered I've only done because I could sense she was unhappy. It's like reading tea leaves with her.

Any advice? My REA (we are using one as a buyer's agent) has been very helpful and gracious with advice but she understandably doesn't want to get too involved in my sale.

HELP! What should I do?

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