I’ve been blogging about my personal experience in buying a Buckhead foreclosure here in Atlanta, Georgia. There is so much to write about, it’s hard to know where to begin.
When we finally went under contract on a bank-owned foreclosure, it was just the beginning of our journey into the depths of anxiety. The bank stated that our offer had been accepted, but we were not under contract, and then faxed us a 25 page addendum, that was five times as large as our original contract. It’s the most one-sided thing I ever read in my life (other than the other bank-owned real estate transactions I have worked on). Their addendum could have been much smaller with one simple sentence, “Absolutely anything we say goes, which is, but not limited to your name, your place of birth, the planet you live on, and what you believe to be reality.”
When you get the addendum, you have to sit down, breath very easily and know that any change you request to their boiler plate language will mean an army of bureaucrats could take weeks to approve it. These are weeks the house will continue to stay on the market, potentially being exposed to higher offers than your current pretend contract’s offer. You’re balancing some fairly outrageous clauses versus the fact that you have a contract on a home for a very good bargain. Ultimately, the only language we struck was a clause that would have fined us $600 for every day our closing needed to be extended, whether it was our fault or theirs. If I’m spending $600 a day for something it better be called Greenbrier or the Cloister. The bank allowed us to reduce the clause to $100 in a fairly quick manner.
We left a lot of other one-sided clauses, such as giving the bank the right to rescind the offer for any reason. You simply can’t go through their boilerplate language, and change it word-for-word. You have to take a leap of faith and remember the bank ultimately wants to remove the house from its books.
It does leave you anxious, knowing the bank can cancel the contract, yet you’re bound to it. You cross your fingers, while holding your pretend contract, as the closing gets pushed back for a variety of reasons, praying for the day you actually own the home. I’ll write a little more about the trials and tribulations of getting to closing in a few more days. At one point, we had dropped our checks off, but still didn’t really own the Buckhead home.
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