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Part 1
Part 2
As you may recall, when we left our heroes, they had placed a 5% down payment (upon completion of the purchase and sale agreement) in the form of a bank check for $LARGESUM in the hands of the sellers, for which they had received a receipt.
We received word from the seller's lawyer that he was unwilling to accept checks. Now, due to some of the damnfoolishness involved with the previous deposit, we expected that he would not accept a personal check; this is why we had obtained the aforementioned bank check.
Since the realtor had elected to mail the bank check to the lawyer, in whose town of business she apparently lives, we decided to wait on being aggravated by this until he had received the check and had time to realise that it was a bank check, not a personal check. We were faintly agitated by the idea of someone transferring such a large sum of money via the mail, but mostly that produced a fair amount of "Oh, these people" muttering.
And there was a bit about waiting for the Post Office to actually deliver the check - and the attorney to acknowledge having it.
So. The lawyer received the bank check.
He informed us that he could not deposit it, because it was not made out to him, personally, you know, someone with no fiduciary obligation regarding the property, unlike the owner or the realtor. Also, it was made out to the realty company, and because that was an LLC the rules are different! he certainly couldn't, as the escrow attorney, deposit the bank check into appropriate escrow. There may have been other excuses, I honestly don't recall.
(When we told this part of the story to our gamemaster, who is a lawyer who works in real estate, I feared he might never be able to remove his hand from his forehead again. The facepalming was that epic.)
We, sensibly, said that we were not going to give them any more money until we had retrieved the money that we had already given them for which you may recall they gave us a receipt. The bank was willing to put a stop payment on the check - we briefly did this and then reversed it in case they decided to deposit it after all and might conclude we were dealing in bad faith when it didn't go through. However, because the check was for some couple hundred dollars above a particular breakpoint amount, the money would not be restored to our accounts from a stop payment until a point that seemed to us to be dangerously close to closing time.
So we managed to arrange to retrieve the actual physical check (which, if returned to the bank, would lead to restoration of funds pretty promptly) and, using the same information under which we had wired the original nominal deposit into the escrow account, wired $LARGESUM into the escrow account.
We also muttered a bit about the ridiculousness involved. Especially![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
artan_eter, who was responsible for the actual check-fetching portion.
Meanwhile, we get further notification of crankiness from the building and fire inspectors of the town of Andover.
There is a brief flurry of activity when we consider that the people we are buying this house from bought it on foreclosure, and that there may have been Robosigning Issues.whispercricket calls the Registry of Deeds to discuss the matter, and apparently the foreclosing form is reasonably respectable, so this is filed as "not something we will worry about right now" and we make sure to get good title insurance.
And we settle in to wait. They have extensive work to do on the place, though much of it is fairly minor, just there's a lot of little things. Mostly, they have to get the permits for the work they already did straightened out. Which they don't appear to have interest in being efficient about, to the point that we nudge our lawyer to ask if they require further poking.
We hear from the sellers. "We don't need to get a permit for this bit, by the way, just letting you know."
"Funny," we say, "that bit was explicitly noted as something that needs a permit. What do you want to bet that they called up and downplayed what they did (while up-playing it to us) without mentioning what the address was, in order to get that answer?"
We did not make this bet. It did not seem worthwhile.
They keep informing us that they have totally gotten the permits stuff straightened out. Meanwhile, occasionally we call Andover to ask about the permits and it gets to the point that when they ask "What are you calling about?" and we give them the address, the secretarial staff says something to the effect of, "Oh. Yes. That."
They inform us that they will totally be on the fire department issues real soon now! The person who was supposed to be doing that totally had an emergency! It'll be dealt with tomorrow!
We find out that the only person who had actually talked to the town was the plumber (arguably fairly minor in this whole shenanigans), who was basically told "That's nice, but don't bother going back to work, because..."
... the town of Andover not-so-accidentally an entire Stop Work Order.
Meanwhile,teinedreugan's parents were coming up to visit. We wanted to poke our heads into the place and show them around, but were getting a lot of "We won't let anyone in until the official walkthrough", though we pointed out that according to the contract we certainly had the right to come in and take measurements and get estimates.
That eventually morphed into "Please don't come by! We are very busy with contractors!" responses. We suspect them of not having been at all busy before the Stop Work Order came down, and then suddenly realising that someone who was actually bigger than them was watching them and seeing if they were upholding their legal obligations.
We did not get access to the interior of the house during the (grand)parental visit, but we did drop by the place to look around the outside.
To our genuine surprise, there was a permit for some of the work posted in the window!
To our genuine unsurprise, there were no contractors present.
We laughed a bit, shook our heads, and went home.
They did not have the work done by Tuesday, as they were supposed to; we reminded them they needed an extension but they said "WE AREN'T GIVING YOU AN EXTENSION!" Our response, more or less, was, "... you're the ones who need it, not us, we could legally walk out here and you'd have to give us our money back, but ... frankly, it's not worth the effort, and we would like a house." So we let it slide.
A few days later we actually got to see a copy of the major permit of concern, fully signed off and everything. We were impressed.
Around then we got the rest of the permits, except for, perhaps ironically, the plumbing permit. Which, we were told, may have been complete and in the possession of the relevant inspector who just hadn't been back to drop it off.
We spend some time doing some detail wrangling on the mortgage end of things, because we do actually have things to do other than twiddle our thumbs and wait for all this to sort itself out. This occasionally has moments of agitation, but goes quite smoothly; more about that later.
We get the distinct impression that the Building Department people were discussing our potential house over coffee breaks, as everyone over there knows what's going on.
We set up an appointment to meet with a contractor for the following Saturday, using that as a tidy way of getting into the house to inspect the work prior to the formal official walk-through. Roughly 80% of the work was done; the remaining 20% of the work was done badly. There was some brief discussion about whether or not this was worth picking a fight over, and we eventually decided against.
We still have no plumbing permit signoff the day before the walkthrough. I'm not sure anymore when this got sorted out, but it has been sorted.
We finally get to the official walkthrough. We are the first to arrive - both our agent and their agent are stuck in traffic - and so we putter about in the yard. It is determined that KJ is alarmed by Very Tiny Ants. We try not to mock her too extensively for this.
We get a second call from our agent, who is in a bit of a panic.
It appears that their lawyer cannot find our $LARGESUM, and believes that we never gave it to him.
The $LARGESUM that he refused to accept.
That we had to reclaim.
That we later wired into his accounts directly.
We are incredulous.
Eventually the agents turn up, and we start the walkthrough. KJ charms the realtor, and helps her test some keys we found in a cabinet in all the doors in the house. We mention the whole "missing $LARGESUM" matter to their realtor as we are discussing things in the kitchen, and it is the first she has heard of it.
"Well ... his computers have been down for two days..." she offers as a possible explanation.
"Which means he should have mentioned this to us three weeks ago," beginsartan_eter, "instead of," he continues, and I conclude with him, "THREE WEEKS AGO."
We note we have a receipt (from the bank). She asks us to get that to her ASAP so this can be sorted out.
We finish the walkthrough, and go to dinner.teinedreugan emails our lawyer about the matter as best as he can on the phone keyboard.
While we are having dinner, we get a return email from our lawyer.
Which is more or less, "Never mind, don't worry, he found it."
There is not enough desk in the world for this headdesk. Our theory at this point was that he didn't check his accounts until after he started bitching in our direction over our presumed negligence and attempt to defraud, including at no point in the previous most of a month.
Then he checked his balances and was all, "Hey, where did this $LARGENUM come from?"
Sigh.
Meanwhile, I, as the family member who speaks the best lawyerese (due to my highly out of date experience as a legal secretary) handle point on talking with our lawyer about how we want the deed made out and so on. And we hear back from our mortgage broker, who would like to let us know that instead of $PERCENTAGERATE that we had locked down when we started this process, she was going to get us $PERCENTAGERATE_LESSONEEIGHTHAPERCENT. We were appreciative.
We get the basics for the HUD-1 form filled out, and confirm that we don't need to be highly precise in our numbers (since one of our checks was for the amount remaining in a temporary account and in any case we needed to get all of them before we had finalised numbers available due to scheduling issues) and would get the overage back at the closing.
Stuff is scheduled. I actually decide to believe in this happening enough to spend a couple of hours reading the Andover Public Schools website (which among other things makes it apparent that there are elementary-school-age children across the street, which we knew from their realtor, but there's a bus that stops there).
We pack up and head to the relevant Registry of Deeds. We get there very early, and thus go and get pastries at a nearby coffee shop and happen to be perfectly timed to run into our agent on the way in. We get up, our lawyer spots us and waves us over, there is a brief exchange of pleasantries with their lawyer, who promptly leaves.
We sign many papers. KJ draws on a piece of scrap with our agent, occasionally making exclamations like "SIGN PAPE!" but mostly quiet and intense.
We get the keys.
We call a freaking locksmith.
ETA: Oh yes, and our mortgage broker comments to us that their realtor had been helpful in getting all of the bank stuff sorted out, and had commented in passing that they felt that they were bending over backwards to make us happy....
Part 2
As you may recall, when we left our heroes, they had placed a 5% down payment (upon completion of the purchase and sale agreement) in the form of a bank check for $LARGESUM in the hands of the sellers, for which they had received a receipt.
We received word from the seller's lawyer that he was unwilling to accept checks. Now, due to some of the damnfoolishness involved with the previous deposit, we expected that he would not accept a personal check; this is why we had obtained the aforementioned bank check.
Since the realtor had elected to mail the bank check to the lawyer, in whose town of business she apparently lives, we decided to wait on being aggravated by this until he had received the check and had time to realise that it was a bank check, not a personal check. We were faintly agitated by the idea of someone transferring such a large sum of money via the mail, but mostly that produced a fair amount of "Oh, these people" muttering.
And there was a bit about waiting for the Post Office to actually deliver the check - and the attorney to acknowledge having it.
So. The lawyer received the bank check.
He informed us that he could not deposit it, because it was not made out to him, personally, you know, someone with no fiduciary obligation regarding the property, unlike the owner or the realtor. Also, it was made out to the realty company, and because that was an LLC the rules are different! he certainly couldn't, as the escrow attorney, deposit the bank check into appropriate escrow. There may have been other excuses, I honestly don't recall.
(When we told this part of the story to our gamemaster, who is a lawyer who works in real estate, I feared he might never be able to remove his hand from his forehead again. The facepalming was that epic.)
We, sensibly, said that we were not going to give them any more money until we had retrieved the money that we had already given them for which you may recall they gave us a receipt. The bank was willing to put a stop payment on the check - we briefly did this and then reversed it in case they decided to deposit it after all and might conclude we were dealing in bad faith when it didn't go through. However, because the check was for some couple hundred dollars above a particular breakpoint amount, the money would not be restored to our accounts from a stop payment until a point that seemed to us to be dangerously close to closing time.
So we managed to arrange to retrieve the actual physical check (which, if returned to the bank, would lead to restoration of funds pretty promptly) and, using the same information under which we had wired the original nominal deposit into the escrow account, wired $LARGESUM into the escrow account.
We also muttered a bit about the ridiculousness involved. Especially
artan_eter, who was responsible for the actual check-fetching portion.Meanwhile, we get further notification of crankiness from the building and fire inspectors of the town of Andover.
There is a brief flurry of activity when we consider that the people we are buying this house from bought it on foreclosure, and that there may have been Robosigning Issues.
whispercricket calls the Registry of Deeds to discuss the matter, and apparently the foreclosing form is reasonably respectable, so this is filed as "not something we will worry about right now" and we make sure to get good title insurance.And we settle in to wait. They have extensive work to do on the place, though much of it is fairly minor, just there's a lot of little things. Mostly, they have to get the permits for the work they already did straightened out. Which they don't appear to have interest in being efficient about, to the point that we nudge our lawyer to ask if they require further poking.
We hear from the sellers. "We don't need to get a permit for this bit, by the way, just letting you know."
"Funny," we say, "that bit was explicitly noted as something that needs a permit. What do you want to bet that they called up and downplayed what they did (while up-playing it to us) without mentioning what the address was, in order to get that answer?"
We did not make this bet. It did not seem worthwhile.
They keep informing us that they have totally gotten the permits stuff straightened out. Meanwhile, occasionally we call Andover to ask about the permits and it gets to the point that when they ask "What are you calling about?" and we give them the address, the secretarial staff says something to the effect of, "Oh. Yes. That."
They inform us that they will totally be on the fire department issues real soon now! The person who was supposed to be doing that totally had an emergency! It'll be dealt with tomorrow!
We find out that the only person who had actually talked to the town was the plumber (arguably fairly minor in this whole shenanigans), who was basically told "That's nice, but don't bother going back to work, because..."
... the town of Andover not-so-accidentally an entire Stop Work Order.
Meanwhile,
teinedreugan's parents were coming up to visit. We wanted to poke our heads into the place and show them around, but were getting a lot of "We won't let anyone in until the official walkthrough", though we pointed out that according to the contract we certainly had the right to come in and take measurements and get estimates.That eventually morphed into "Please don't come by! We are very busy with contractors!" responses. We suspect them of not having been at all busy before the Stop Work Order came down, and then suddenly realising that someone who was actually bigger than them was watching them and seeing if they were upholding their legal obligations.
We did not get access to the interior of the house during the (grand)parental visit, but we did drop by the place to look around the outside.
To our genuine surprise, there was a permit for some of the work posted in the window!
To our genuine unsurprise, there were no contractors present.
We laughed a bit, shook our heads, and went home.
They did not have the work done by Tuesday, as they were supposed to; we reminded them they needed an extension but they said "WE AREN'T GIVING YOU AN EXTENSION!" Our response, more or less, was, "... you're the ones who need it, not us, we could legally walk out here and you'd have to give us our money back, but ... frankly, it's not worth the effort, and we would like a house." So we let it slide.
A few days later we actually got to see a copy of the major permit of concern, fully signed off and everything. We were impressed.
Around then we got the rest of the permits, except for, perhaps ironically, the plumbing permit. Which, we were told, may have been complete and in the possession of the relevant inspector who just hadn't been back to drop it off.
We spend some time doing some detail wrangling on the mortgage end of things, because we do actually have things to do other than twiddle our thumbs and wait for all this to sort itself out. This occasionally has moments of agitation, but goes quite smoothly; more about that later.
We get the distinct impression that the Building Department people were discussing our potential house over coffee breaks, as everyone over there knows what's going on.
We set up an appointment to meet with a contractor for the following Saturday, using that as a tidy way of getting into the house to inspect the work prior to the formal official walk-through. Roughly 80% of the work was done; the remaining 20% of the work was done badly. There was some brief discussion about whether or not this was worth picking a fight over, and we eventually decided against.
We still have no plumbing permit signoff the day before the walkthrough. I'm not sure anymore when this got sorted out, but it has been sorted.
We finally get to the official walkthrough. We are the first to arrive - both our agent and their agent are stuck in traffic - and so we putter about in the yard. It is determined that KJ is alarmed by Very Tiny Ants. We try not to mock her too extensively for this.
We get a second call from our agent, who is in a bit of a panic.
It appears that their lawyer cannot find our $LARGESUM, and believes that we never gave it to him.
The $LARGESUM that he refused to accept.
That we had to reclaim.
That we later wired into his accounts directly.
We are incredulous.
Eventually the agents turn up, and we start the walkthrough. KJ charms the realtor, and helps her test some keys we found in a cabinet in all the doors in the house. We mention the whole "missing $LARGESUM" matter to their realtor as we are discussing things in the kitchen, and it is the first she has heard of it.
"Well ... his computers have been down for two days..." she offers as a possible explanation.
"Which means he should have mentioned this to us three weeks ago," begins
artan_eter, "instead of," he continues, and I conclude with him, "THREE WEEKS AGO."We note we have a receipt (from the bank). She asks us to get that to her ASAP so this can be sorted out.
We finish the walkthrough, and go to dinner.
teinedreugan emails our lawyer about the matter as best as he can on the phone keyboard.While we are having dinner, we get a return email from our lawyer.
Which is more or less, "Never mind, don't worry, he found it."
There is not enough desk in the world for this headdesk. Our theory at this point was that he didn't check his accounts until after he started bitching in our direction over our presumed negligence and attempt to defraud, including at no point in the previous most of a month.
Then he checked his balances and was all, "Hey, where did this $LARGENUM come from?"
Sigh.
Meanwhile, I, as the family member who speaks the best lawyerese (due to my highly out of date experience as a legal secretary) handle point on talking with our lawyer about how we want the deed made out and so on. And we hear back from our mortgage broker, who would like to let us know that instead of $PERCENTAGERATE that we had locked down when we started this process, she was going to get us $PERCENTAGERATE_LESSONEEIGHTHAPERCENT. We were appreciative.
We get the basics for the HUD-1 form filled out, and confirm that we don't need to be highly precise in our numbers (since one of our checks was for the amount remaining in a temporary account and in any case we needed to get all of them before we had finalised numbers available due to scheduling issues) and would get the overage back at the closing.
Stuff is scheduled. I actually decide to believe in this happening enough to spend a couple of hours reading the Andover Public Schools website (which among other things makes it apparent that there are elementary-school-age children across the street, which we knew from their realtor, but there's a bus that stops there).
We pack up and head to the relevant Registry of Deeds. We get there very early, and thus go and get pastries at a nearby coffee shop and happen to be perfectly timed to run into our agent on the way in. We get up, our lawyer spots us and waves us over, there is a brief exchange of pleasantries with their lawyer, who promptly leaves.
We sign many papers. KJ draws on a piece of scrap with our agent, occasionally making exclamations like "SIGN PAPE!" but mostly quiet and intense.
We get the keys.
We call a freaking locksmith.
ETA: Oh yes, and our mortgage broker comments to us that their realtor had been helpful in getting all of the bank stuff sorted out, and had commented in passing that they felt that they were bending over backwards to make us happy....
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