negotiations require special skills and an understanding of the psychology of offering and counteroffering. Agents keep the transaction dispassionate and rational. For example, a buyer (you) might like a home but despise its wood- paneled walls, shag carpet, and lurid orange kitchen. When you work with an agent, you can express your opinions on the current owner’s decorating skills and complain about how much it will cost to upgrade the home without insulting the owner. Your agent will translate that to the seller—that you like the property but can see having to spend a certain amount on decorating costs and thus can offer much less.
CONTRACTUALLY SPEAKING…
Many contracts and documents are involved in purchasing a house, and the stack could be more than an inch thick. Unless you’re a real estate lawyer or title agent, these documents will be foreign to you. Yet, they require detailed and accurate completions. Buying a property is not necessarily a “fill-in-the- blanks” transaction. One mistake in title work could haunt the buyer well down the line after purchase. This very situation happened. A property that sat on a double lot was put on the market. The neighbor bought it to remove a bit of the second lot to expand his yard. The seller then put the home back on the market, and it sold. Months later, through a property tax notification, it came out that, in preparing new deeds for the properties, the expanded yard area was correctly in the neighbor's name; however, the house had been transferred to the home buyer. The new homeowner now owned both houses, and the neighbor owned his expanded driveway and yard.
Fortunately, they were good neighbors and settled the matter
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