Posted by JohnBoy on February 03, 2005 at 21:06:01:
Based on just what you have stated it sounds like they have no valid reason to back out. If they do you could keep their earnest deposit.
They made the contigency that if repairs were more than $5000. If they are less than that, regardless of how many repairs it may be, it’s still less than the $5k they agreed on…they lose!
The mere fact they have agreed to buy the property with up to $5k in repairs needed obviously suggests they knew about most of things they are complaining about now. Otherwise, why agree to accept the property up to $5k in repairs??? Why didn’t they limit it to $1k or as long as no repairs were needed?
The only issue now is whether you failed to properly disclose anything by law that is required to be disclosed. Or if you filled out a disclosure that was false.
Unless your contract states anything about you agreeing to refund any appraisal or inspection fees, then why would you be responsible for it? The only way they could recover any of this cost is if they can prove you failed to properly disclose any defects that you are required to disclose by law. Meaning you knew of the defects and failed to disclose or knew about it and failed to disclose by trying to conceal it.
What does your attorney say? This is the person you need to be asking about this.
my husband and i are selling our house. we received an acceptable offer and entered in a contract with the buyers. their only contingency was that if there were more than $5000 worth of repairs, they could get out of the contract. after the inspection, they asked us to fix quite a few things. we offered $1000 toward repairs and the refrigerator they had asked for after signing the contract. this was not accepted, so we had a contractor out to give us an estimate on all of the repairs they requested (which was less than $5000). they are now saying that repairing all the items is unacceptable and they want out of the contract. they say that we should have disclosed these things that were wrong with the house because some of them were obviously old.
although i had an inspection done when i originally purchased the house, i did not request any repairs because i did not find anything significantly wrong with the house. it was built in 1927, i knew it would not be perfect. i no longer have a copy of this inspection and filled out the disclosure statement to the best of my ability.
my question is…can they get out of the contract and get their earnest money back and are we responsible for their inspection and appraisal costs?