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Sunday's Most Active Threads

by Jeff Steele last modified Jan 30, 2023 10:25 AM

The topics with the most engagement yesterday included buying a house with flaws, the future of Russia, teaching in FCPS, and celebrity surrogates.

Yesterday's most active thread was titled, "De facto 'as is'" and posted in the "Real Estate" forum. The original poster has previously purchased four houses, but is in the process of buying a home in northern Virginia for the first time. A home inspector found several items, some of which are fairly big ticket, that needed repair or replacement. Based on the original poster's experience, he expected that he could submit the inspector's report to the sellers and they would then negotiate an amount that the sellers would cover. However, the sellers refused to provide any money in response to the inspector's report. Therefore, the original poster considers this to be an "as is" sale even though it was not advertised that way and asks if this is normal in northern Virginia. Without explicitly saying so, many of those responding make it clear that this is fairly normal behavior for sellers in northern Virginia. Many of those responders criticized the original poster because they believe he should have noticed many of the items the inspector identified before making an offer and other items would not normally be considered in such negotiations. Other posters are more sympathetic to the original poster and agree that there should be some negotiation. Posters on both sides of this argument agree that the original poster should simply walk away from this purchase if he is unhappy about the seller's refusal to negotiate. Much of the thread is devoted to analyzing the list of items identified by the inspector. Many argue that only items that present safety hazards should be covered. The original poster at first estimated that the cost to repair things would be $15,000, but after several posters suggest cheaper alternative ways of addressing the issues, he seems to conclude he could get by at a fraction of this price. As a result, the original poster seems to be reconsidering whether this is even that big of a deal and is going to take the days he has remaining before being required to respond to consider his options. The original poster is fully prepared to walk away from the deal and mentions from that from now on he will negotiate offers with the expectations that sellers will not be willing to negotiate inspection findings.

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