Missoula Notebook
Taking Possession of Our Little Piece of Missoula
By Sutton Stokes, 4-05-08
Certain clues in a newly purchased house might lead you to suspect that the seller left in a huff. Puttering around in our new Westside place a few days before our move-in, for example, Amy and I discovered prominent brown stains in the toilet and a pile of motorcycle parts and broken gas grills behind the garage. Concerning the latter, the obvious lesson is to make sure that, on the final walk through, you walk around each structure on the property, but of course we probably wouldn’t have delayed closing over a little trash even if we had spotted it.
If anything, we would have dug in our heels about the disappearance of the vintage Pepsi-Cola bottle opener that was once mounted on the kitchen wall, next to the stove. Hadn’t the seller — let’s call him Rick — ever heard of the rule that anything actually attached to a house conveys to its purchaser, unless specific provisions to the contrary have been signed by both parties? But we forgot to check for the thing during the walk-through, and later — as we sat with pens poised in the title-company office — we just couldn’t remember if it had been there or not, so we decided to chance it.
Live and learn.
To his credit — and I want to be as even-handed as possible here — Rick did leave behind the cast-iron curtain rods and muslin drapes (which Amy was really hoping he’d leave), several elk skulls (which I was really hoping he’d leave), and some sort of device for suspending dead animals from the ceiling in the garage, which we hadn’t noticed on any of our previous inspections of the property but which seems like a handy thing to have in these parts. And, as if to make up for the state of the toilet, there was a fresh roll of toilet paper in the bathroom cupboard, right next to the February 2008 Playboy. (“Miss February wishes you a happy Valentine’s Day.”)
It’s possible Rick wasn’t overjoyed about the price his house fetched. On the kitchen windowsill, we found a slip of paper from a fortune cookie: “You will soon have the opportunity to make a profitable transaction.” Did Rick leave this behind because he felt it hadn’t been meant for him? Fortunes can get crossed up that way sometimes, although — as some of you may know — even those that don’t quite seem to fit can usually be improved by adding the words “in bed” to the end. Our offer was only about 6 percent less than Rick’s asking price (and of course no one forced him to take our offer), but then again it was almost 12 percent lower than the price at which he’d first listed the place for sale in the early fall.
My parents went through an ordeal like this when they put their D.C.-area home on the market about two years ago, just as the air was first starting to rush out of the real-estate bubble, and ended up waiting almost exactly a year for an offer they could live with. They secured a bridge mortgage that enabled them to buy their next house before the first one sold, but this meant my mother had to delay retirement for a year so that they could keep up with the now even larger monthly payments. A few months in, they emptied out the old house and had it “staged” by one of these full-service real estate agencies. My father moved into the new house, a couple hundred miles away, and my mother lived during the week in a closet of the old house, poised to make herself scarce at any moment in the evenings or on weekends if some prospective buyers happened by, and trying to minimize her impact on the careful arrangements of furniture and decorative touches set up by the agent’s design consultants. This “staging” stuff is supposed to help, although I have to wonder what would have proved that it didn’t help: maybe if the house had stayed on the market two years instead of only one? But anyway, I can sympathize with anyone who learns that their house isn’t quite as attractive a property as they’d hoped.
Still, until you’re selling at a price someone is willing to pay, you’re not really selling, and if Rick is sorry his house didn’t fetch him more green, perhaps he should have replaced the roof (currently necessary within the next year or two), put in a bathtub (though so far I’m able to squint and pretend that the “shower-only” bathing option means I’m staying in a mid-range hotel), or painted the garage occasionally. As I’m sure I don’t have to remind anyone, times are tough in the housing market, for both sellers — in the sense that it’s supposedly a buyer’s market — and buyers, in the sense that it’s getting tougher and tougher to secure a loan. Amy and I and Rick should probably all count ourselves lucky that this deal worked out as well as it did.
For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.
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