A few weeks ago, we asked for your real estate horror stories. We’ve compiled our favorites, plus a few ghastly real estate tales from the spookier corners of the Internet. Settle in and enjoy!
Our first story comes from Brian Roberts, a broker for J.B. Roberts, Jr. & Co. in Madison:
We had a Pizza Hut for sale and received a full price offer from a buyer in California. He was an older gentleman who had family ties in Wisconsin, and as many West Coast investors do, he wanted to take advantage of the relatively higher cap rates in the Midwest.
We went through all of the steps of the normal due diligence process, got to the close — both buyer and seller signed all of the documents, and then waited for the sale to be funded. The money was not coming, so I called the buyer, who had not attended the closing but signed prior and overnighted his executed documents, and asked him why there was a delay in funding. He told me that he hadn’t wired the $857 required by his “lender” for the funding to occur, and that he wanted the lender to deduct that fee from the proceeds being sent to fund the sale.
We dug a little deeper into who his lender was and found out that our buyer had been duped. His lender was in London and that the funds were coming from a sovereign fund in Nigeria, and as soon as the buyer wired the London lender the $857, he would direct the sovereign fund to send the funds necessary to fund our sale.
As you might have guessed, no funds were ever going to arrive, and our buyer was not able to secure funding from another source, so we wasted 6 weeks of our time and the title company’s time for a deal that was never going to happen.
We could have forced the buyer to perform, but we knew, realistically, that he had no ability to perform. So we let him out of the deal, chalked it up to experience, and moved on.
Lesson learned: Verify the buyer’s ability to pay/perform early in the sales process!
Kris Ackley, Director of Development for Easter Seals Wisconsin, also shared a story:
When going through the building process for the first time, there were so many decisions to be made. The builder knew all of our lighting fixtures were silver and nickel tones, even on the outdoor fixtures. He never asked us what type of door hardware we wanted and we ended up with all brass.
Unfortunately, the doors and hardware were some of the last things installed and we didn’t realize the mistake until the home was completely built and we were doing our final walk-through. It looked horrible, but would have cost us quite a bit to switch everything out and we already had so many overages we just did them a little bit at a time once we got into the house.
Turning to the Internet, writer Liz Spikol knew her new row house in the Rittenhouse neighborhood of Philadelphia wasn’t perfect. Despite its shortcomings (including a persistent “locker room” smell) and a disclaimer form that said, “We have seen a mouse,” the house was cozy and affordable, so she made an offer.
A few months after moving in, she had to investigate a leak by removing a few wood planks from the ceiling. “Blue powder, dead mice, skeletons, and droppings rained from the ceiling,” she writes. “Removing the entire ceiling revealed dozens and dozens of mice in various stages of decay. The blue powder was poison, thrown in packets throughout the ceiling.” The lingering odor turned out to be the smell of scads of decaying mice — far more than the single mouse the owners claimed to have seen.
Coming home from vacation can be stressful as it is, but coming home and finding that a new family has moved into your house? That will take it to a whole new level. Gaby Fleischman of CBS Miami reported that a Miami man came back from a two-day vacation to discover a family had moved into his rental home. The squatters had a lease agreement from a phony real estate agent that said they paid $3,600 to live there — and the phony real estate agent was no longer answering his phone.
Mark Cohen of This Old House magazine thought he had found the Dutch Colonial Revival of his dreams in a town in New Jersey. Then, three months after closing, he learned that an underground oil tank on his property had leaked into the soil and groundwater of half the block around his house. Cohen writes that the years-long cleanup process took thousands of dollars to battle insurance companies and lawyers, involved removal of more than 1,000 tons of contaminated dirt, required his home’s foundation to be completely dug out and necessitated an emergency loan from his father for the couple to stay solvent.
In Colorado, landlord Jon Didleaux was shocked when his tenant was arrested with 56 pounds of marijuana. The worst part, though, was when he discovered that his tenant had practically destroyed the 1,800-square-foot home in order to support his pot-growing operation.
“They had tapped into the plumbing so they could set up an irrigation system … they ripped out all the carpet in the basement … then they put an air conditioner in the backyard and put a separate furnace in and tapped into all that,” Didleaux told KKTV Channel 11 in Colorado Springs.
In addition to that, the tenants dug a trench from the yard to a power pole and stole up to $8,000 in electricity over the course of about five months.
Didleaux said his insurance company paid about $20,000 to cover the damage.
Rental agreements are very clear about what pets (if any) are allowed at a property, but landlords can tell you that doesn’t always mean the tenants comply. In Britain, Gary Armstrong rented out his parents’ house with a ban on all pets. When he checked on the property some months later, he discovered his tenants were keeping a 700-pound pig in the house — and that the house was in serious disrepair.
Acting as the executor of an estate is always a big job, but sometimes it ends up being much, much bigger than expected. In an article for the Wall Street Journal, Veronica Dagher writes about a client of lawyer Stacy Singer, who turned out to be a hoarder.
The client, a wealthy widow in her 70s, had always been impeccably dressed and well organized in their meetings. Then Singer went to the woman’s house after the client’s death. “The house had a well-manicured lawn, but the lawyer could barely open the front door,” Dagher writes. “When she did, there was hardly any space to walk. Throughout the house, various types of papers were stacked from floor to ceiling, with a path only two feet wide snaking among the piles.”
Treasures — such as $12,000 in cash that was stored in potato chip bags and $20,000 worth of sculptures — were hidden throughout the home. Singer says three professional cleaners had to wear biohazard suits to work in the house, which took three weeks to empty.
“Singer estimates the hoarder’s estate cost about four times what a nonhoarder’s estate might have cost to settle and took about four times as much time,” writes Dagher. Once it was cleaned out, Singer was able to sell the house in “as-is” condition to a buyer who planned to repair it.
Property managers usually have plenty of stories about memorable tenants — and frequently they aren’t told with fondness. A former property manager in Chicago recalled a renter who was evicted in a process that took eight months of court appearances and extensions.
Despite the acrimonious eviction process, the tenant seemed to leave the apartment in nearly perfect condition. However, a couple of days after the new tenants moved in, they complained of an odd smell.
“We inspected and did not find anything wrong. The HVAC filters had just been replaced. We had replaced the carpets as part of our standard turn. The walls had a fresh paint of coat. Nearly everything in the apartment was brand new. The source of the odor could not be found,” the former manager wrote. “A few days later, more complaints from the new residents. Again, we inspected and found nothing wrong. As a precaution, we had the apartment repainted, filters replaced, carpets cleaned and even had a deodorizing bomb while the resident was out of town for the weekend.”
The smell still didn’t go away, so another inspection was done. This time, they could see some discoloration on the walls of the apartment. The property manager poked some holes in the drywall and, “to our complete surprise, maggots crawled out of the holes. … The evicted tenant had cut multiple holes in the drywall in every room of the apartment and thrown packages raw meat into the wall cavities — steaks, ground beef, chicken breasts, pork chops, etc. Before moving out, he patched the holes so well that they looked as if they had never been touched.” The apartment and the surrounding units had to be gutted to get rid of the smell.
In a blog post on HGTV.com, Tammy Stoner writes about how her foray into being a landlord went terribly wrong.
She and her family purchased a fixer-upper in Los Angeles that they restored to its early 20th century glory. Then came a job change that required relocation and, hoping to return to it someday, they decided to keep the house and rent it out.
All was well for six months until “our renters called to tell us the house was haunted. They had eerie pictures of floating white orbs and documented occurrences involving spinning microwave clocks. A woman they’d invited over to release the ‘trapped spirits’ had instead gone into ranting convulsions. Needless to say, they were moving out.”
Stoner and her family decided to sell the house and, three weeks later, drove to Los Angeles to clean the house and get it ready to put on the market. That’s when they discovered “ that in addition to séances, our renters had also held beer busts and art exhibits at the house, using the exterior wood siding of our lovely home to hang paintings — very heavy paintings, judging from the size of some of the holes.
“In a mere six months, our home had become a pockmarked brew pub with piles of salt in the corners to ward off evil spirits and an empty planter out back that looked like it had been put to use by some of the lazier male beer drinkers.”
The lesson they learned? “Renters might not take care of your property as if it’s their home, much less yours.”
