If you’ve bought or sold a house, did you hire an attorney? If so, what did they do for you?
Poll coming.
I didn’t. I had a realtor.
In NY it’s required to have a attorney, so yes I used one 3x. My advice is get suggestions from the realtor and then find someone else who will represent you, and not the realtor’s interest (which is to get the home sold no matter what - which seems what the attorneys will do to keep being recommended ). Same with home inspections, get their suggestions then find someone not on that list.
Wow. And I thought I was cynical.
I had neither a lawyer nor a real estate agent, and neither did the seller. We just met personally and agreed on the price, payment schedule, moving dates, sale of contents, etc.
From hearing the experiences of others, I’m glad not to have had any of those other people involved. Saved both me & the seller lots of money & lots of hassles.
When my father died in Illinois, the real estate agent and the bank both told me I needed a lawyer to sell his condo. I called my father’s lawyer, and he said he didn’t do real estate, but gave me the names of a couple of area lawyers. I guess there was some sort of Illinois, or at least county, regulation about it, because no one seemed at all surprised by it.
In Missouri, where I live, there’s no requirement for a lawyer, and I didn’t use one for selling or buying.
Definitely so - and one time, I the seller and she the buyer both had the same attorney. We had the same Realtor, which they’d seen many times, but never the same lawyer. It wasn’t a conflict because there was no adversarial anything going on.
Both of us had picked him out of the phone book, in her case because she had just finalized a divorce and part of the settlement included a sum of money to be used for the down payment on a house. When she and her husband separated, several people recommended a very aggressive cut-throat attorney (someone at a meetup I was at just a few years ago said, “I know exactly who you’re talking about!” but I didn’t ask) and this attorney was recommending that she pull not-funny stuff, like, “If you tell the judge that your husband beat you up, you can get more child support.” :mad: IDK why she got divorced, but she strongly denied that anything like that had ever happened, and she wasn’t about to lie like that to “benefit” her daughter.
She had also fired her first Realtor because that one kept showing her houses that were way beyond her price range, and she wouldn’t have wanted a house that big anyway, for just her and her daughter.
Required in NY, as stated above. Very glad I had an attorney the first time out. Second time it didn’t matter.
Yes, of course. Here in Canada it is very common to use a lawyer, and some lawyers only do real estate deals. Heck, I had to do a real estate transfer when I was studying for the Alberta bar (it was a requirement, along with exams, etc., in order to pass the bar).
A lawyer acts as a “one-stop shop” for everything that needs doing: working with the mortgage lender, the realtor/broker (and funds deposited with them at the time of offer), seeing to the transfer of funds through his or her trust account, making sure that the property plan and buildings are in compliance with local bylaws and zoning, searching the title, and a few other things. Basically, once an offer has been made and accepted, all the buyer and seller need to do is to put the matter in the lawyer’s hands, and not worry until the lawyer calls them in to sign a pile of documents.
I am the trustee for a property (which is, thankfully, about to close) that is in another state and had some cloud over the title, so I felt like I had to get a lawyer on the ground to straighten that out. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gone near one.
With our first purchase (a condo in Georgia) we used a regular buyers realtor. I forget the details but I assume he took the regular (3%?) commission from the transaction. I don’t think we hired an attorney directly but if I recall correctly one is required at closing and would have been present?
For our current house in Washington state we hired professionals at a fixed price: $1500 to a realtor to perform comparisons and assist with negotiations; $2000 to a real estate lawyer to draw up contracts, modify terms of the title insurance, and generally help us understand the consequence of things.
For that house we didn’t really need a buyer’s agent to show us a bunch of property: we already had a property in mind. I suppose we could have done everything ourselves but I’m glad we didn’t. It’s a substantial financial transaction with serious consequences and I welcomed the professional guidance.
I’ve never sold a property so I don’t have any intuition for the process from that side.
I did when I bought my house. It wasn’t too expensive either, something like $50 to check everything out and $50 to attend the closing. He basically just scanned the contract, confirmed that it was boilerplate and pointed out a few things that we should be aware of (as first time buyers).
He also told us that we could legally take a walk through the house 3 days prior to closing and strongly suggested (or maybe required us) to do so. He’s said that many times he’s seen issues where the buyer walks through (or finds out when after closing) and finds that the sellers removed things that were supposed to come with the house, be it implied (like kitchen cabinets, in one example) or things written into the contract, like the fridge or stove. This gives the buyers time to deal with it.
When we walked through the house, we found that they had removed the washer and dryer which were written into the offer. Now, they had new ones in the house for us, but I mentioned to my then wife that if for any reason we wanted to back out, we could use that as the reason.
In our case, it didn’t make any difference, but I can think of plenty of examples where a lawyer would be helpful, especially with first time buyers.
Looking back, we probably could have had him help us with some issues that cropped up after the sale. For example, the inspector found some maintenance things that he wanted fixed which were all written into the contract and subsequently ignored by the seller. It also took them about 2-3 months to finally get all their stuff out of the house, not counting the enormous about of garbage they left behind. I probably should have gotten quotes on the maintenance items (cleaning the water heater burner, painting the soffits etc) and had the lawyer request they pony up for it now.
The one and only time we’ve bought a house, we had a lawyer. It turned out to be a good idea, but for an unexpected reason – our lawyer had done dozens of closings, but the seller had hired his friend to be his lawyer; said friend had only recently passed the bar, and had never done a real estate sale before. So, he had no idea of the expectations as to what the seller’s lawyer would take care of.
When things weren’t happening as they should have, our lawyer wound up coaching the seller’s lawyer through the process.
I might be naive, but I would expect that an ethical Realtor would follow the law and within that restriction try to maximize the utility of their client.
Sure, an agent on commission benefits from the highest possible sales price when their fee is a percent of the sales price - but they also benefit from getting the deal consummated.
The agent and the bank may very well follow the letter of the law, but others don’t. In the example I mentioned, our lawyer told us about things the homeowner did and had us make take steps to avoid them. I also remember him pointing out some of the things in the loan that while totally legal, were things that he wanted to make sure we understood before we closed.
These didn’t apply to us, but for example pointing out an early pay off penalty or making sure you understand that an ARM loan means your rate (payment) will change in a few years or understanding that the HELOC you got with the loan is an interest only payment.
Sure, the banker may have explained that to you, but they’ve done it so many times and can explain it so fast, it’s easy to miss. If everyone that closed during the mortgage crisis had someone that sat down with them for 20 minutes instead of two and explained how their sub-prime, interest only mortgage worked, maybe it wouldn’t have been as bad.
Let’s see , what did my lawyer do? Reviewed the contract, negotiated some changes, arranged for the inspection and title insurance ( including advising us to buy an owner’s policy), attended the closing in case there were last minute issues (like the price we would pay for the oil left in the tank
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I’ve bought a house once in my life, and had an attorney present at the closing. Just in case.
Wife and I are both lawyers - tho not RE lawyers.
When we bought our first house, we did the closing ourselves. In a relatively “clean” closing, there is really not that much for a lawyer to do for buyers who are not selling property that a reasonably intelligent person couldn’t do by reading everything carefully.
For all other sales/purchases, we’ve used lawyers. Just too many goofy things can come up that make it worth their price. I remember one time a good buddy asked me to do his purchase close. Shortly before the close, a bunch of mortgages and liens came up. Now, an experienced RE atty could handle those just w/ a couple of standard forms, but I didn’t know - so I told him to get an atty.
If selling, you have more responsibility. We have found it well worth it to have an atty do that for us.
Not one on my side, but both of my house purchases have been in Spain, where the contract and all associated paperwork have to be reviewed by a notario in order to ensure that it fulfills legal requirements as well as the desires of all* parties: notarios must have law degrees and the exam to get admitted into notario training (not even to actually become a notario, just to go to class) is considered the hardest one in Spain. So, while I didn’t specifically go and hire my own lawyer to review anything or to represent me, in each case one of the things both parties had to do together was hire a notario and meet with him. The sale isn’t final until the notario signs.
- Since the notario also checks mortgages etc. there is often more than two parties involved and more than one contract being checked.
QFT. Especially the home inspector part.