Been a while since my last posting, but I’ve been busy being sad about my WoW guild shutting down. This post is about the process of removing the last few contigencies on my home purchase offer – home inspection, HOA documents, and lender agreement.Since this is a relatively new unit, the home inspection was less about finding all of the problems… er “quirks” of a given home, and more about creating a user’s guide about how to maintain the house. The inspector was quite good about discussing many of the finer aspects of the house that my untrained eye couldn’t see. He took lots of digital photographs which are included in his pdf report(which can basically function as a manual for home ownership for me). Outside of making sure that all the plumbing, electrical bits, appliances were all in proper working order, he found some defects in the home siding as well as in some of the bathroom tile. We brought these findings back to the seller, and score, got another $500 off of the price in exchange for removing the inspection contingency.
As far as the HOA documents, my agent Bob brought them over on Monday afternoon, giving me three days to review them and escaping from the offer. After the time was up, that contingency automatically goes away. It’s pretty amazing that a 1/3rd inch binder of poor quality photocopies cost around $350 to create. Theoretically a PDF version was available for $25 less, but that’s pretty damn crazy. Doing a bit of digging yielded http://ridgetopcommons.org as the underutilized community web site. There seemed to be nothing abhorently terrible in them, with the most demanding item being that most exterior changes requiring HOA approval in order to happen(which I think is pretty typical for HOA agreements). As I had suspected the parking spots right in front of my unit are open parking, which should make having guests over an easy proposition(and thus I can start to work off my hosting debt).
And finally the last contingency that I had was the lender’s letter pending an appraisal. The appraisal came back at $11k under the sale price for the house. Pretty drastically below the sale price. After a bit of discussion with Bob(and indirectly with the selling agent) we came up with some ammo to get the appraiser to reevaluate the appraised value. One of the interesting points is that for the comparison homes they included the amount of seller assistance in the value, but not for the appraised value of my future place. With that, and some aspect that we believe that the seller missed, we eventually got a revised appraisal which ended up at $4k below the sale price of the house. Bringing that back to the seller, ultimately we decided to split the difference, so I get to have pay $2k less overall in exchange for having $2k more down upfront. Sounds like a good deal to me!
So those three pretty much covers my last contingencies for getting out of this offer unscathed. Now I have to prepare for settlement(July 30th) and get ready to move.