THE SAGA OF REAL ESTATE WOE[PART ONE]

It all began on a seemingly harmless Friday – the twenty-third of June, in fact. After a bit of a hassle, the wife and I had finally obtained our homeowners’ insurance binder. While we were confused as to what this actually was – perhaps a Trapper Keeper? – we eventually ascertained that it is just a promise to insure the home to be purchased. Thus, armed with said binder, the wife and I strolled hand in hand to our lawyer’s office to arrange for the much-anticipated closing date for the purchase of our first home.

I do not mean to intimate that this has been a process without the occasional hiccup – the seller disappeared for a while and took forever getting agreed-upon repairs done to the front porch – but, we both thought, all was ready to go and we were prepared to move into our new home the next week.

We had already given notice to our landlord that we would be vacating our apartment at the end of the month, and the hassles with the bank – a hitherto unmentioned mandatory five-day wait for a closing date, as though we were purchasing a firearm – and some annoyances with the homeowners’ insurance – the company I had been with for years had problems with the difference between the house’s selling price versus the cost to rebuild it, as though we were purchasing it with the intent of arson – left us with precious few days remaining to close and move in.

Thus, the wife and I were both jubilant and a bit on edge as we walked into the lawyer’s office on that fateful Friday. Little did we know, as the lawyer requested we sit down, what was to come to pass. Even as he began the meeting with telling us about the PBS series he had been watching the past two evenings – a special on doctors who have to tell parents that their children have terminal illnesses – we remained unprepared and simply commented that that must be awful, in no way connecting this show with our plight.

And then it happened.

When we asked how early in the next week we might be able to close, the lawyer told us that we had a problem. We threw our hands up in exasperation at another possible delay, and asked how much longer it might take. The lawyer leaned back in his chair, opened our now rather large file, and exhaled a long, slow “Well…”

That is when it began to sink in, and we entered into the saga of real estate woe.

It was at this point, dear reader, that the lawyer explained to us that the seller – henceforth to be referred to as the Douche-Nozzle – did not in fact have marketable title, and was thus unable to sell the house. Or, more accurately, our title insurance company found some serious problems with the title history that rendered it uninsurable despite the fact that the Douche-Nozzle’s lawyer had done a title search and had somehow missed the gigantic, enormous, problem that was now staring us in the face.

For those of you who hate details, now might be an appropriate time to avert your eyes. Indeed the next few moments in the lawyer’s office felt rather too similar to that scene in Raiders of the Lost Arc with all the melting faces and the wrath of the Lord and the suffering and misery and all. You see Douche-Nozzle has a partner – let’s call him Ass-Clown – and in late 2004 Ass-Clown transferred his half of the ownership of what was to be our house to the Douche-Nozzle, purportedly in return for receiving 27,000 dollars. At the same time the Douche-Nozzle took out another mortgage on the house for 54,000 dollars, and shortly thereafter the Ass-Clown declared bankruptcy.

In theory this is okay, except that the Ass-Clown did not declare the 27,000 dollars he supposedly received in exchange for his half of the house as an asset when he declared bankruptcy; thus it seems that the title was transferred to the Douche-Nozzle to shield the house from bankruptcy proceedings. This, unfortunately, is a squinch illegal. Between the transfer of title and the bankruptcy there is a missing 27,000 dollars and thus bankruptcy fraud that directly impacts the status of the house. In order to clear the title, the bankruptcy must be reopened, but if it were reopened, the bankruptcy trustee would most likely take possession of the house and sell it off to recoup the money due to the creditors involved in the Ass-Clown’s bankruptcy.

Thus, the wife and I found ourselves in a situation where we could not buy the house we were about to move into. You may ask yourself why this only came out days before the closing – a question we have asked many a time. The only answer I can give you is that that is the way it is done. Not a very satisfying answer, is it? I still do not think so, and I really didn’t then.

One would have thought actually having the legal ability to sell a house would be a precondition for selling said house. A reasonable person might expect a realtor to look into these things to cover themselves, but no, checking whether a house can be sold is not the first step in the process, but the last, one which follows a rather extensive series of costly procedures including mortgage applications, structural inspections, and legal fees, all of which the buyer is responsible for. The first question I would ask, if I were a realtor and some came to me to sell a house, would be “Is the house really yours?” But, apparently, all that is really necessary to list a house with a realtor is a rather cursory disclosure on which it is perfectly acceptable to guess, and the ability to supply a key so it can be shown. So, theoretically, one could enter a house, murder the owners, bury them under the basement floor, take the keys, and try to sell the house. While obviously the whole murdering thing is a crime, and assumedly the title search would show you don’t own the house, the realtor would go ahead and throw contracts to sell the house around like nobody’s business. While the Douche-Nozzle did not kill anyone – we hope – he had little more right to sell the house than the hypothetical murderer.

Hence, once all of this came out, I slipped out of the lawyer’s office to make a phone call to the realtor. This, perhaps, was ill advised, but there it was. I called and pretty much told the realtor – though, to be more specific, it was the closing specialist at the agency the wife and I were working with – what I thought of what was going on. While I was not precisely insulting, I must admit that I made some specific demands in a rather elevated tone of voice.

Following my vociferous phone-call, I re-entered the lawyer’s office where I had to explain my departure, for which I received a stern tongue-lashing and was made to promise to make no such calls without permission in the future. At this point there was very little left for us to do; it was now in the lawyer’s hands. You see, we had several choices: one was to sue for specific performance – i.e. to have the Douche-Nozzle clear up the bankruptcy fraud issues – or, two, to terminate the contract, and this is where things really revealed themselves to be ugly. The Douche-Nozzle still claimed that there was no problem with the title, that the bankruptcy thing was not a problem.

Of course, he was wrong, but there it was. Apparently, even though he could patently not fulfill the requirements of the contract – that is, to provide marketable title – the contract is not necessarily nullified automatically if he cannot. You see, he claimed the title was good, and thus, in his opinion, the contract was still valid. Hence, the contract could not move forward without the title insurance company’s consent, but could not be fully terminated without the Douche-Nozzle signing a release form, thus ending the contract. The wife and I, dear reader, were in limbo.

One could conceivably excuse the Douche-Nozzle’s actions as ignorance. Perhaps he did not realize that what he and the Ass-Clown had done was bankruptcy fraud. He may have indeed thought he had done everything properly and was now entirely entitled to sell this house. Under normal circumstances one might extend this courtesy towards his motivations, except for the fact that the Douche-Nozzle and Ass-Clown had declared bankruptcy a total of three times over the past ten years. They also, as we found out that sad Friday, had taken out three different mortgages on the house totaling well over the price we had agreed to pay them. Indeed, someone, quite innocently, could have been as mistaken as the Douche-Nozzle was, but, in this case, it seems entirely unlikely. The Douche-Nozzle was being, quite simply, a douche-nozzle.

Thus, the wife and I left the lawyer’s office, a mere hour after we entered, to find ourselves in a changed world. Stunned, we walked to the car and began to drive home. About halfway through the short drive to our soon-to-be-no-longer apartment, the wife began to cry and I completely lost it. I mean I cracked. I no longer felt safe driving. I was losing control of my limbs. I pretty much just went into shock. I pulled the car over, stopped, got out and walked the rest of the way home. The wife drove the rest of the way after I assured her I would be okay and just needed to walk. When I arrived home I just collapsed in the kitchen while the wife, over the next half hour, pulled me back together.

After a bit of ranting, and then some laughing, and following the composition of the first of the real-estate haiku, we decided we needed to get out of the apartment and do something, anything. So we stopped by the post office to check the mail and then decided that perhaps it would be a good idea to apologize to the closing specialist at the real estate agency. Seeing as she was not, in fact, the Douche-Nozzle or the Ass-Clown, she had in no way earned the right to be yelled at. Thus we drove across town to see if she was in her office. Upon our arrival both she and our real estate agent came out to the foyer to meet us – the closing specialist had apparently relayed the problems to our realtor. I apologized for the yelling and the hysterics, and then the wife and I went upstairs with the realtor to begin the whole house hunting process anew, this time with the fact that we were to be without abode in a mere seven days hanging over our heads.

[To be continued…]