We’ve been thinking about relocating out of town then found a quirky 100-year-old house we really liked that’d give us a lot of equity. The price was a little higher than we thought was right, so we offered $18,000 under (which seems like a lot, but we were pretty sure it was fair) and wound up settling on $6,000 under. It still seems pretty high for the property and area, but we really vibed with the house and didn’t want to lose it.
Counter offer was accepted contingent on the sale of our current house, which we got pretty easily. Set up an inspection and found a few problems. The main ones being active termites in a small section of the house, old wiring that includes cloth wire and a weird combination of multiple shut-off switches in the basement, galvanized pipes, old floors and foundation that’ll need to be taken up and jacked, a gas stove top with only two working eyes, and an HVAC from the mid-90s.
We were fully planning on doing a total rewire and knew about the issues with the floor. We already have quotes from foundation companies and knew it’d be a project house just like our first one. But here’s a few things confounding us:
The termite inspector we hired mentioned he’d already been out to the property a few months back, found activity, and as a result, the previous sale fell through. The house was taken off the market as ‘By Owner’ and then relisted a little while later with an agent. It seems like nothing has been done to try to fix the issue, no treatment or anything. And the price actually went up after returning to market.
The original listing is just flat-out wrong. I don’t expect them to want to divulge termites, but it sells the house as having all new wiring and HVAC, which it doesn’t. It does have a new electric meter, but that doesn’t remove the fire risk from the old wiring or the chance that the 30-year-old HVAC can go out any day.
The listing was changed between our offer being accepted and the inspection to remove mentions of wiring and HVAC. When we went back to the listing to figure out the discrepancies between the house and the listing, we noticed it was changed a couple of days ago. Our buying agent still had the printed version to confirm the difference.
This is starting to feel sketchy and it’s frustrating because we quickly got our house market-ready, found a buyer, and got this far in the process to feel like we’re kind of getting scammed. I guess I’m just kind of wondering how unusual this is and if there’s anything we can do to at least leverage all of this towards a better price or to have some kind of recourse. Yeah, we still really like the house, but we can’t just knowingly allow ourselves to get taken advantage of.