Hi all,
My wife and I are first time homebuyers and had our offer accepted a few weeks ago on a house. We were fairly confident the market value on the house was between 240-250k (although the sellers had it on the market for $279k, they had bought it only two years earlier for $210k) - we offered 235k and were promptly rejected, so we sat quiet for about a month until they came back to us willing to negotiate. We settled at 246k.
Last week we had the inspection which found a generally good house, but there were a few issues needing attention. Primary of these was that the inspector found a few spots of inactive termite damage in the attic. Our realtor advised us that the owners would have to get this taken care of because a bank wouldn't give us a loan if there was termite damage in the house. Other issues that we included in the contingency list were a number of older floor tiles in the laundry room that likely had asbestos in them were cracked or broken, a number of the windows were older and had cracks, there was a small bit of wood rot in the detached garage, the outlets next to the sink in the kitchen were not GFCI outlets, etc.
We sent this list to our realtor and asked the owners to have these issues taken care of. They proceeded to not work with their realtor (I think they are still mad that she talked them into coming down so much on the price of the home, even though that is what the home is worth) and instead involve their attorney to negotiate going further. I just got off the phone with the attorney who we were using (and whom our realtor recommended) and he seemed to be pushing back on me a lot on some of these issues, namely the asbestos floor tiles. He was saying things like "they're just going to get pissed off if you tell them to get a lab analysis done of the scrapings of the broken tile" and when I suggested that they could simply layer over the broken tiles he responded "but they're older tiles - how are they going to match them?"
Basically, it seems to me that his MO is that he's getting paid a flat fee of $750 regardless of whether he goes back and forth with the other attorney or just puts together a simple contract so he doesn't want a long drawn out process.
Are there others here who have experience with home buying (or who simply know about homes) who can provide some advice on the issues that we brought up, whether we should just drop them, or what we might be looking to expect going forward?