Addendum issues

So, Mr. and Mrs. Seller had had our counter addendum for about a week, which in house closing time is an eternity. They are not required to respond until the June 21st [4 days before closing]. This wasn’t a huge problem, but we did run into some issues with the lender and the settlement [law] firm.

Both the lender and the settlement agency need to know what the final sale price is going to be, including concessions and the like.

The lender needs to make sure [I’m not quite clear on why this is] that they concession is not in an amount that is larger than the closing costs. Our representative from the lender told us that otherwise it would be as if the seller was giving us money. I personally don’t see the issue of this, to me it is the same as lowering the agreed upon price of the home. We are asking for concession, right? Not an assist in closing cost. I think that the there has been something lost in translation.

In addition to that, our settlement agency was not on the pre-approved list at the lender, therefore before the lender would fully commit to our closing date, they wanted the title search and title insurance to be completed… this was a problem.

The problem for our settlement agency was that our paralegal did not want to get the ball rolling with all the closing items [survey, title prep, etc.] until we had agreed upon a price, otherwise we would have to pay for these items and not have a house to show for it.

In the mean time, we were jumping through hoops for the lender and our seller and in addition to other things going on in our life and we were under the impression that we were under contract with our seller and therefore everything that should be in motion for closing was.

We were [disappointedly] wrong. So, to fix this, we explained to our paralegal that we were going to go through with the purchase even if they sellers did not meet our concessions of $5,000 and that we would accept the $2,000. After that, everything was in motion! It looked like we might actually be buying this house!