House for Sale

You’re shopping around for your next home. You go on a number of showings with your Realtor and you come across the perfect place. You make an offer and the seller accepts. Your Realtor will probably suggest you insert something like “subject to satisfactory financing” on your offer sheet. You’d probably also include the term, “subject to satisfactory home inspection” just to be certain your making a sound investment.

For the sake of this example, let’s say the financing is to your liking and the home inspection revealed just a few issues that the Seller was more than willing to have corrected on his nickel. So you close your loan and get the keys, the moving company is packing your furniture, and you’re now in the process of living happily ever after in your new digs.

Time goes on and things are going wonderfully until one morning, after several days of severe rain, you go down to the basement to find water all over the floor. After the initial shock, you begin the vacuuming and mopping process until you get it all cleaned up. You begin wondering where this water came from? Could it be a plumbing leak of some sort? Could it be a first time thing, the Seller would have no knowledge of? Might it be something the Seller was fully aware of but, forgot or failed to disclose? Did the Home Inspector fail to do his job by not finding anything about this dangerous condition? You may even begin thinking this is probably just a one time and it will never happen again, So you go on about your business not giving it a second thought…until…it happens the very next rain.

Now you realize that someone had to know this condition existed and you want to get to the bottom of it! Who’s guilty? Who should pay for the repairs? Is it the previous homeowner or the home inspector? How should I proceed? Check our next post for some enlightening and surprising answers!