Monday, March 14, 2011

"We'd love to sell you the house, but we don't own it"

Editors Note: Written October 29th, 2010

So yeah, the title kind of says it all. The bank was dragging their feet on sending us a fully executed contract of sale and we couldn't figure out why. At the same time they were posturing saying if we couldn't close by the due date, then the deal was off, while not allowing us to turn on services to do a proper inspection, and all in all being a bunch of tools... Dealing with banks, not my favorite practice...

The house was apparently seized by the state for illegal activity, something about drugs and money laundering... Given that it is right across the street from the high school I can see the thought process of tapping into that market, but clearly it didn't work out as well as the owner had hoped. The bank fears that the state seizing the property means that they don't own it anymore, the state does.

So now what? Apparently nothing, the bank is not going to do anything, the title company has done their jobs and moved on, so its up to me to figure out how to get er done...

Went to the states web site, and if I had to do it again I wouldn't be able to figure out how I did this, and found a listing for all of the departments and their phone numbers in the state of new Jersey. There are literally thousands of phone numbers on this list... after about half an hour of trolling down the list I call some likely candidates and pray.. mostly voicemail.

Next morning I am shocked when someone calls me back. Sorry if you work for the government, but lets face it, you guys don't have the best track record for customer service... Anyways, this particular person was very helpful, as while she was not the right department she eventually figured out where I should call.

Now comes the waiting game, and the calling game. I'm particularly persistent and annoying, so I have been calling this person, on both phone numbers that I have, every hour on the hour until I get something other than voicemail, pray for me...:)

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