The house sold, to the third offer. After the inspection, the buyers lowered their offer by $5k, plus asked for window replacement, which would have easily been upwards of a grand. This was moderately annoying since the main contested issue was exterior paint; while I wouldn’t debate the deterioration, I would certainly venture to claim that peeling paint on exterior walls was not something I could easily hide – not something to be tucked discreetly under a painting of flowers – so perhaps one would feel that the issue had been taken into account when I priced the property. Anyways, feeling like some compromise was in order (especially factoring in the avoidance of my March mortgage payment), I countered with a flat $3500 and that was accepted. We celebrated. Then came the hiccup.
When it came time for me to sign the FedExed papers, escrow sent along a closing statement which credited me closing costs of $8500. I didn’t think too hard about it (“hmm – this number is bigger than I was expecting – I like it.”), particularly since the closing costs hadn’t been itemized so I had no idea what was involved; and so I signed on the dotted line. The next day, the money showed up in my account and it was $17k lower than the number on the closing statement. I stewed about this for a weekend, called up escrow on Monday and was informed that the $8500 figure was credited to me when it should have been deducted from me. That same day a revised closing statement showed up showing the deduction instead of a credit.
At this point I hadn’t really questioned where the $8500 number had come from, but thankfully Susan prodded me into questioning it that night. It didn’t help that the figure had now been broken down into far more detail than before and the new statement looked nothing like the statement received prior to closing. I stewed some more that night. Then I chased down my realtor and escrow the next morning, and after a few more phone calls, it was decided that someone screwed up and added $5000 and $3500 together. So I was out $5k. Quite fortunately, a fiscal mess was avoided when the buyer accepted that there was an error and sent another check to escrow, which was eventually passed along to me.
As a computer programmer, I could maybe understand how an OR could mutate into an ADD operation. I’m sure I’ve performed more egregious errors during coding. Slips of the brain. Finger error. My bugs lead to dead pixels though. As a person who has cold hard lucre on the line, I’m far less understanding how a signed piece of paper with the words “seller hereby rejects all buyer provisions” could be misunderstood in such a fashion. Furthermore, a certain lack of responsibility on the part of multiple parties – do I really have to read the closing settlement in such detail? – leaves me shaking my head a bit about the whole affair. There is a moral or two here, about making sure peeling exterior paint is listed in disclosures, and the difficulties inherent in signing escrow papers when out of state and not having someone give line by line explanations, but morals tend to be lost on me.
