Before Sean and I bought this house we were under contract for another one that turned out to be an absolutely horrible overpriced piece of crap that would have made for a great bon fire.

The owners were very insistent that they couldn’t come down AT ALL in price. It was cheaper than the house we’re currently in, but it was also a much smaller house. What the house lacked in floor plan it made up for in acreage, so theoretically it would give us plenty of room to build off of in the future.  Anyhow, obviously that house didn’t happen for us – and here’s why:

The house was a pre-fab model that’s commonly found down here, it was purchased and placed on the property around 2005-2006 – so it’s not even 10 years old (keep that in mind).  During the inspection we learned the main pilings for the house were rotting away, there were some big erosion issues based on grading concerns from where the house sat below the main road (I think there was a good 60-70 degree angle on the DIRT driveway that you needed to climb in order to get to the street.  I wasn’t thrilled by that at all. Cosmetic kind of things are easy to fix, structural and you won’t budge on the price? Nope, don’t think so.

Another major area of concern was with the well water. When having it tested it quickly came back as highly contaminated (secondary proof by the fact that the water heater was rotting through the floor), and the septic had some issues as well, probably having something to do with contamination and lack of upkeep. There were holes in the fireplace, the roof needed to be completely replaced, and the shed at the back of the property was just a junk pile of scrap wood and rotting beams. The carpets were missing in spots, all of the doors had some kind of holes in them from someone who clearly went on a violent rampage at some point in time.  They managed to hide a lot of these issues with older photos of the home so we weren’t 100% sure as to what we were walking into on the “Let’s take a look day” but we knew with a little elbow grease as well as new carpets and doors the place could be pretty decent. Inspection proved otherwise, however, and needless to say, we were leaving that contract with the quickness.

Since Sean is currently taking a quick ride to pick up dinner, this house popped into my head and I went on the search for the listing to see if it ever actually sold.  Turns out, it didn’t. It was just completely taken off the market.  The owners wouldn’t budge for us, they claimed they would fix areas that would cost them tens of thousands of dollars to address (knowing they had no money) and we in return continued to do everything we could to leave the contract, which included a massive loop-hole in their “Nah, we’ll do this for you” plan. Refusing to fix structural issues and have ALL pipes in the house replaced AND have the house connected to public water were our “outs” for the contract. Every answer was “We don’t have the money, the mortgage is more than we’re selling for” yada yada.  The house was borderline foreclosure.  So you can imagine my surprise when I came across the listing and saw the pricing history. They’ve been attempting to sell this house for 2 years. Since we left the contract for them to shove up their asses they’ve dropped their listing by $30,000 (within the last 15 months).  I find this amusing considering it’s the number we were initially looking for that they refused to come down to due to financial matters. The listing now shows that the house is officially off the market.

Now, the realtor is known for doing some shady shit. She’ll let a lot of things slide in the case of just working on getting the house sold. We’d dealt with her previously for other listings and while she’s very well known in the area, there’s just no way we were going to be utilizing her services for OUR home purchase after the crap that she’s pulled.  She’s good at offering previous inspections in order to save some money for future buyers (mainly because contracts have fallen through in the past on the house.. gee wonder why?), but I doubt she’d ever be able to have her customers cough up a receipt proving things were taken care of.  She also knew we had the pre-approval from the bank since she’d dealt with us on another house so I’m damn sure that played a role in her client not budging on this house.

So per the listing, and the fact that there’s no transfer history on it ANYWHERE… I just have to say that karma’s a big ‘ol bitch and I’m amused as all holy hell. The owners and their realtor were too cocky for their own good and now the house is going to continue to sit there and rack up money and cave into the rotting property.  They were pretty close to being behind on their mortgage a year and a half ago, it’ll more than likely wind up going into foreclosure and being put up for auction.  Whomever is dumb enough to buy it better consider bulldozing it and getting a new pre-fab and putting it in it’s place. There’s absolutely nothing that can be salvaged. I think the only saving grace to the house was the massive pool off the back deck but even that looked like someone backed into it with a pick-up truck or something. They also were dumb enough to not even bother covering the damn thing so who knows what was down at the bottom of the murky water.

Doing a history search on the house (when we were buying) notes quite a bit of police activity. They claim previous ‘tenants’ had had some run-ins with some not so good people so that that prompted them to put in a security system.  This could have explained the holes in the doors and broken glass here and there. That was a big red flag for me considering all of the logged reports against the house were for domestic violence within THEIR family (not tenants), a ‘brush fire’ and then some illegal dealings with running a business off the property and there being some zoning issues (that was a town based report).

There was absolutely nothing LEGAL about this house and honestly minus the fact that the one we’re currently in has it’s faults – there’s no way in hell I’d be happy in that hell hole. Now after 2 years their realtor appears to have given up on them, the house is still sitting there rotting away on it’s pilings, the water is more than likely still contaminated and they won’t see a damn dime.

HA!