When the Inspection is Really the First Showing If it hadn’t just happened to my own client, I would have thought it was something straight out of Florida or Southern California, circa 2005 — not Minnesota in 2013. Namely, without so much as viewing my client’s home, an apparently “big bucks,” out-of-state corporate Buyer showed...Read More
Dealing with a Too-Fussy Home Inspector Yes, there is such a thing as a home inspector who’s too lax. But, there are also home inspectors who are too fussy — mostly to protect themselves in the event that the Buyer later wants to pin some problem on them (good luck with that — most inspectors’ contracts...Read More
Ten Days on the Market? Or One?!? The housing market this Spring — at least for some kinds of homes, in some Twin Cities neighborhoods — is even hotter and faster than most people realize. That’s because a key MLS statistic that purports to track market time in fact significantly overstates how long a particular...Read More
One of the trickier — yet crucial — set of deadlines in a housing transaction involves the Buyer’s Inspection Contingency. At least in Minnesota, it consists of the following three intervals: 1) how long the Buyer has to perform the inspection; 2) how long thereafter they have to deliver — in writing — any issues...Read More
Legal Minutiae It’s not unusual in the course of a real estate deal for numerous terms to change — and others to be added. What’s the best way to document that evolution? My personal preference is a one page Counter-Offer Addendum that effectively rides on top of all the preceding documents. Not only does that cleanly...Read More
Ticking Clocks and Cold Sweats As an undergrad and Law School student, I would occasionally dream that I was hopelessly behind on an exam, with time running out (once, the exam was literally in an unrecognizable foreign language). As a lawyer, that was replaced by a new, albeit infrequent nightmare: that I was months behind...Read More
