Monday, March 14, 2011

The continuing saga of closing a bank owned property

Editors Note: Written October 12th, 2010

Since its bank owned, and no one lives there they take precautions that otherwise would be bizar for a home owner... such as turning off the water, gas, pulling the electrical meter, draining and covering the pool...

Now they don't just turn them off in the house, no thats too easy and someone could turn them on, turn on a tap and flood the house (or open the stove valve and blow the house up) they have the service provider turn them off. This makes house inspections impossible, well not impossible, but basically useless.

Turning the services back on is a challenge because you don't own the property yet... if your agent is creative like mine is, you can get most of them turned on... water will be on tomorrow, and gas later this week. Electrical is more complicated because they pulled the meter and didn't simply turn it off from the street, so we have no idea when that will happen.

The HUD inspection is complete, we have our estimate and it puts us outside of the streamlined 203k program. But since we had a hud inspector come through instead of a home inspector (they are often able to accomplish both, so if you are in line to do something similar make an agreement with your inspector for a discount to get both done) we were in a position that the bank didn't care if it was streamlined or not, it really came down to what we could afford. Now I am waiting to hear back from 3 contractors that were recommended to us, to see who can do the work in the timeframe we want, and at what cost...

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