Posted by River City on March 13, 2009 at 08:22:41:
This is just an opinion, however, I believe that if your contract states the seller will be responsible for the inspection, that if he breaks the contract by not making repairs as stipulated in the contract, you could actually win in small claims court and make him pay for the inspection (and any court costs involved). It really depends on the wording in the contract. Some of the others (Rich, John Merchant,etc) might be able to answer this question better than I can. Like I said, this is just my opinion.
Posted by Jennifer M. on March 12, 2009 at 22:02:08:
We have a contract with a seller who signed an addendum to the contract stating that he will make certain repairs. Now that he knows that the repairs will be much more expensive than he expected, he is refusing to do them. We are getting an FHA loan and we have sent the seller a letter from the lender stating that FHA will not close until all repairs agreed upon are completed. If he continues to refuse to make the repairs and breaks the contract, we will have to pay for all the inspections, etc that he agreed to pay for at closing. What can we do to either push him to honor the contract or get him to pay the closing costs, even though there may not be a closing.
Posted by Natalie-VA on March 15, 2009 at 07:01:18:
Jennifer,
Our local contract has a cap in it that protects the seller from repairs costing too much. Does your contract have such a cap? If not, then you should hire a real estate attorney to file a specific performance lawsuit along with a lis pendens to cloud title. People will tell you that this is very expensive, but often the mere filing of the lawsuit will encourage the seller to follow through with the deal without racking up a lot of legal expenses.
you really need an attorney. You can push him by sending him a notice to perform (that’s what we’d use in CA) which puts him on notice that (1) you intend to enforce the contract and (2) he is in violation of the contract. I would ask an attorney to outline the process for you, but I would not have him do the actual work since its pretty straight forward and you just want to make sure you do not miss anything. If you do it yourself, you can use small claims court to get back all the costs the seller was supposed to pay.