We decided to venture in the process of buying a home....biggest mistake of my life. We found our selves stopping by open houses just to see what was out there. Some had paint obviously picked out by a color blind person and others smelled like every stay stray cat in the state of VA had stopped by for a bathroom break. One of the better ones we stopped at had a realtor my husband seemed to click with, he seemed nice enough to me but I know sales is sales and sometimes that diamond is just a rock with glitter on it. None the less he seemed to understand what we were looking for and respected our laid back approach to searching. We quickly figured out that housing here goes fast! Like super fast, meaning the good ones go in 5 days or less. After about the 6th house we missed out on the Hubs and I decided maybe we should start looking a little harder.
After a few after work trips to look at houses we found THE ONE. Completely remodeled, with only a few finishing touches left to complete. Everything was grey scale (just the way I like it) and was in walking distance to the Elementary School. We decided to make an offer! At the suggestion of our realtor we put in a full price offer with some stipulations. Add a deck over the busted up patio, finish the flooring in the sun room & install garage door openers. Keep in mind I assumed that surely the outstanding items to be finished would be completed, example: installing the smoke detectors on the counter, having the house semi cleaned or at least wiped down, removing all the equipment and old appliances from the garage.
Inspection is completed and they only had a few simple things but otherwise said the house looks great.
Closing day arrives on Wednesday and this is where I started to get nervous. They had us do the final walk through the morning of....absolutely nothing had been done! Not a dang thing, nothing cleaned, equipment in the garage, smoke detectors are still sitting on the kitchen table from the time the inspection had been completed the house had not been touched. We were assured that everything would be completed in a timely fashion and to have no worries, said our used car sales man of a realtor. We were advised to proceed with closing by both our mortgage company and our realtor, wanna know why? They just wanted to get paid.
I get off work expecting to go to finally see the house of our family's dreams completely finished. Nothing, had been touched. My husband finally realizes that the crap has hit the fan and starts calling... wanna guess what happens next? No one answers not a soul, no one on our team or the sellers want to answer our calls. We decide that okay maybe it is after business hours and decide to go back to our rental house and hope all is better tomorrow.
Fast forward to Friday night after I get off work. We finally got someone to answer our calls and assured us we had not been forgotten about that they would be there to finish as soon as possible. At this point I had no faith and was already looking to contact an attorney but our wolf in sheep's skin realtor just kept calming my husband down saying "this is a process, this is what it takes to own a home." I knew this as complete crap but hey I have only been in Property Management for 8 years what do I know about customer service. We decide to finally try and take a load of stuff over to our new house, I am so glad that we did. The brand new HVAC that had been installed in January has leaked all over the brand new carpet. Soaked the hallway, the closet, and both of the children's bedrooms. All I could do was cry.
Here we have spent all of our savings buying this house to get out of our rental that flooded and is now covered in mold to have the exact same thing happen again. Two for two on houses in VA! Again, complete radio silence from all parties phones. Except our realtor who basically went to bad so sad but if you have a shop vac I will help you clean it up.
This has been one of the worst experiences our family has ever had to go through. Two weeks later we are finally getting to move into our new home and we are just crossing our fingers that our Homeowners Insurance doesn't sky rocket or drop us after having to make a claim within days of our policy going into place.
I wanted to share this so that any one thinking of buying a house uses people you know and TRUST! People that have amazing reviews and had friends or family use them before. Read the reviews and DO NOT DO WHAT WE DID!
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