All Things Real Estate: Realtors make sure you get all disclosure forms
All Things Real Estate: Tim Jones
Q: My wife and I are in the Air Force and were assigned to Travis last year. While still in Texas, we had started looking online for a house when we found one a guy was selling without using a real estate agent. We contacted him and he said if we’d buy it quickly, he’d drop the price since he was saving the 6% real estate sales commission. We bought it sight-unseen. Now we’ve been in Fairfield for about six months and there are lots of problems. Based on what the neighbors have told us, I think it had been vacant for at least a year. After we closed escrow and moved in, we started discovering that things were wrong. There was a leak in the roof that had caused quite a bit of dry rot. Then we discovered what we thought was a soft spot in the floor near the corner of the house. When we had somebody come out and look at it, we discovered the entire front corner is sinking. We just don’t have the money to fix a problem like that. My wife’s brother lives in Los Angeles and is a real estate agent. We contacted the seller and he said that there is a disclosure in the package, which we signed, that says the house is “as-is.” My neighbor says we should have used an agent, but we wanted to save the money. Are we just stuck?