It's official

FINALLY!!! The deal is done! It was supposed to be completed on Monday, but due to a couple of minor complications, we had to postpone the closing date.

The problem started on Friday about 10am for me. I received a phone call from my real estate agent and he told me that there was something on the purchase and sale agreement that we had never seen before. He got me very worried. What could this be? Why now?

The seller had inserted 2 notes. One indicated that the water entered 73 Arlington before 75 Arlington and the other indicated that the sewer did the same thing. My property is 75 Arlington and I needed to know what this meant. I was afraid that this water thing could cost me a lot of money. It was particularly interesting due to the timing of the release of this information. It made me VERY skeptical.

My real estate lawyer got a hold of this and he gave me an analysis. He asked me if I had seen this before, I said I hadn't. He told me that the page looked like it had been edited. As in, the previous copy that had been signed had been modified, so that the two hand-written notes were inserted. In simpler terms, there seemed to be an act of FRAUD.

What had actually happend was that the seller's real estate agent did not communicate their information very well. When you are in negotiations, the information passes back and forth fairly quickly. It's reasonable that pages get lost in the shuffle I guess. Regardless, I was not about to accept this explanation without doing some additional diligence. I wanted to be sure that there was NOTHING wrong with the current setup.

I got a statement from the seller saying that he was not aware of any defects in the water or sewer in writing. This was a good first step. The second step was to get my cousin Jason, a plumber, to come and inspect the current water setup. The setup looked fine, so I was very relieved. Finally, we called the city to ensure that the splitting of the two systems was allowed. Since this was an older home, this was perfectly legal because it has become grandfathered into law.

Now, I had to do this diligence because if the current water and sewer setup is disfunctional, it may mean that I would have to get my own water and sewer hook-up from the street. This would cost thousands of dollars. I'm glad everything was ok. Since this was a material item, I was able to get a couple of extra days to perform my diligence. I got it done, and now I'm the proud owner of 75 Arlington.

You see, I was very afraid that this deal would fall through. First, I was not prepared to pay for a place that would cost me a fortune just to get up to code. Second, I thought the last minute nature of this information was released in order to kill the deal. If I actually found a problem, we would have to re-negotiate a credit to the purchase price and I thought that the seller may be able to walk away from the deal at that point.

The other interesting fact was that the seller did not disclose any problems in the Seller Property Information Statement about the water and sewer. Therefore, the last minute nature of the information scared the begeebers out of me. It's all settled now. I can take-off to Cuba now without having to worry about the deal going through. It's ALL DONE!!!