House Hunt Starts Again
I'm glad we took a closer look at the house before signing anything. There are serious issues with the driveway, garage, and backyard.It's a drainage problem. All the surrounding yards drain into this yard. From there, the yard drains toward the house!
The house did not originally have a sump pump or drainage tiles, but they were added at some point over the years. This suggests that water leakage has been a problem.
The driveway is long, slanted, and cracked. It needs to be ripped out, re-graded, and replaced. The garage has serious settling cracks, the garage footings are cracked through the slab, and part of the garage appears to be sinking. The yard directly behind the garage is saturated.
We finally got a look at a previous inspection report, and to our suprise the report clearly identifies these problems. The buyers should have disclosed this to us, but didn't. It's the second underhand thing that they have tried. I mostly blame their realtor, who I suspect is leading them down this path.
Everyone expected us to sign an offer last night. When we walked away without signing anything, the owners and the listing agent took a long, hard look at the situation. They now realize (or are now admitting) that they have a problem. They are bringing in some contractors to see about fixing the problem themselves and relisting the property.
We'll talk to them during this process, but I doubt we will buy this house now. If they sink a lot of money into repairing it, they will want to sell it for a higher price which we can't afford.
The only way we could buy it in the current situation is if they get a quote for the repairs and decide to lower their price by that much.
We'll see what happens.
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