Resent-Message-Id: <8707231500.AA01123@bk.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 87 15:11:13 EDT
From: baldwin@cs.rochester.edu
Message-Id: <8707211911.AA25206@keuka.cs.rochester.edu>
To: bjz@sei.cmu.edu
Subject: Re: Buying a new house
Resent-To: bovik@spice.cs.cmu.edu
Resent-From: Barbara.Zayas@sei.cmu.edu
Resent-Date: Thursday, 23 July 1987 11:00:32 EDT


	About lawyers. My wife and I bought a house this past winter,
with the help of a lawyer. One warning up front - my wife IS a lawyer,
so (a) I may be biased as to the general worth of the species, and (b)
we got legal services free through her firm anyhow, so what the hell....

	I think the places where having a lawyer was most helpful were
in framing the initial purchase offer (something not mentioned on your
list - maybe you're already past this stage) and in checking over the
final mortgage terms. As far as the purchase offer goes (if you don't
already know this stuff), that's where you tell the seller in writing
"we'll buy your house for $X, but you have to do A, B, and C first",
etc. Typical values for A, B, or C are "fix the following broken
items", "repaint", "include the following appliances, lawn fixtures,
etc. as part of the sale", or whatever. You may go several rounds
of offers and counter-offers between you and the seller before you
get details worked out, typically with a tight time-frame for
responses (no-one wants the other party to take an offer to another
buyer/seller to try to bid up their side of the deal). Having someone
who knows what you want and is good at sorting out fine print quickly
here can be helpful. (As an interesting anecdote re purchase offers,
a friend of ours recently bought a house that had some attractive
blueberry bushes on the property - on moving-in day, surprise surprise,
he discovered that the bushes hadn't been included in the sale and
had in fact been transplanted to the seller's new place. Be sure your
offer makes clear what you think you are buying.)

	Right before closing we went through a few rounds of sorting
out stupid problems with our mortgage. Personally I think the problems
were due to the bank being too stupid to be believed rather than malice,
but again having a lawyer actually read the terms of the mortgage
agreement helped. Examples of stupidity include forgetting the rate-locking
terms we had been given at application (e.g., how many days before
closing we had to lock - that may have been malicious), and not noticing that
we were buying a small part of a large farm and so wanting a tax escrow
account based on 140 acres of farm instead of house-and-10-acres.
Interestingly, it was my wife rather than our official attorney who
caught and fixed most of these problems, but again it's a case where
having someone knowledgeable about the business read the fine print can
be helpful.

	As far as I can tell, the lawyer's main role at the closing was
to go to lunch with us afterwards.

	So, I guess I'd summarize by saying that in my experience a lawyer
can definitely be helpful in writing the various contracts you'll be
entering into with different people (seller, mortgager, etc.). The lawyer
is less necessary in dealing with cut-and-dried procedural parts of the
purchase, like the Ritual of Closing, the Pre-Closing Inspection, etc.
('though I suppose if you're nervous about things a good lawyer might
be a big help just by reassuring you that you don't have to put up
with last-minute crap that people might try pulling off). From the
previous discussion on misc.consumers.house about lawyers and house
purchases I understand that the ratio of cut-and-dried procedures to
case-by-case contracts varies considerably from state to state, so my
experiences from New York may not carry over 100% to you (Pennsylvania?).
Good luck whatever you decide to do.