Our former unscrupulous deal with a seller’s agent was much more simplistic than that.
I had insisted on getting a survery done, and the seller’s agent scoffed at me, saying it wasn’t necessary.
But the three lots had never been surveyed, and I wanted reassurance that everything was legitimate at sale.
The day of the sale we sat in our attorney’s office. Both the selling agent and her broker were seething with anger... because I was wasting their time. They had tried to talk me out of getting an attorney to represent me at closing.
We waited and waited for the survey results. But the surveyors records and the tax records did not coincide with each other.
When the surveyors went to survey the lot, they did find it was on three plots of land. We knew this.
But the title deed was fashioned using old tax records. And it was found that the house sat on the center lot. But the other two lots weren’t part of the sale. In the county records only the center lot was shown. And all of the paperwork was drawn up using these no longer valid records.
This is why we had hired an attorney. We needed to protect our investment, and if we hadn’t, we would have lost the other lots and forfeited any access to the road or the pump house.
To make a long story short, our lawyer made the selling agent and her broker revise all of the paperwork... to ensure it was clear that we were buying all three lots, not just one.
The interesting part of all of this was that the selling agent was the homeowner. She had tried to force an illegal sale, to her benefit. She wanted the other two lots to remain hers.
If we hadn’t caught it at time of closing, she would have owned the other two, and we would have been out of luck.
Needless to say, I don’t necessarily like realtors in general. I don’t trust them.
Moral of the story: If you think a real estate agent is acting in your best interests (seller or buyer agent, it doesn’t matter), you are badly mistaken. The book “Freakanomics” has a nice example of the incentives at work.
Good for you. Lucky for your family you are a smart cookie.