My family and I settled on buying a quaint house in the countryside.
My builder “friend” helped us along the way and we were going to have him do a renovation.
How it would work out is that we would buy the house under the extremely low interest rate and it would include a complete renovation. We signed the papers and got approved but found out the house owner had a title issue.
The house owner’s late husband had the portion with the house on it in his sister’s name for some odd reason. The rest of the land (large amount) was in the husband’s name. Since he is deceased the house would go to that side of the family’s inheritors.
After going through the entire process for buying the house but coming across this titling issue we offered to pay rent towards the house cost while they figure out the titling issue. Fast forward to early winter, 2023. The titling issue is resolved. Finally, we can move on with the project.
Having lived in the house now for \~16 months we have wanted to change some of the renovation plans and the builder says that will cost extra. I say that’s fine, but please explain what the extra costs will be. No response. I message again about some of my concerns with the previous contract as per the builder that was only to get approved for the loan and not for overseeing the entire build (\~500,000円 to just get basic designs for the loan to get approved). Nothing in the contract stated this. So basically how he does business. Well, when I tried to dig into the numbers a little more that’s when the builder “friend” stopped responding.
2 months later, the realtor is getting antsy and messaging regularly asking what the update is. He said he hasn’t been able to reach our builder “friend” whom he was in regular communications with since they were tied into the loan process. (Hard to explain)
Finally, made contact with our friend the builder and they said they would not be working with us since we don’t trust them. Which I don’t, but I had been respectful the entire time with the builder and biting my tongue instead of blowing up on them for how much I felt they were misleading us. So actually I’m happy to not be working with them and to have ended that “friendship.”
Well, we message the realtor that we will proceed without the renovation portion of the loan and just take out a loan for the house amount but we can’t meet immediately as he is requesting. I am busy until next month, May 2024. He kept messaging when when when. He has always been pretty respectful with messaging but now he just seems like “Hurry up, hurry”, which I understand as we are hitting the 21-month mark of living in the home.
The catch is, that all of the land and house might already be in my name. So we are on a promissory note to pay for the house. I’m not entirely sure as the contract is a little confusing to me so I am hoping to clarify it.
My main concern is that we messaged him 2 weeks ago saying let’s meet on a certain day in May but he hasn’t responded. He hasn’t messaged since we requested to meet on a certain day.
If the house is not in my name, could they evict us quickly without warning?
If the house is in my name, do they have any leverage to hurry the process?
The previous owner was kind and easy to work with. I have no desire to prolong the process as I am ready to finish the contract and be done with the purchasing process.
Any reason the realtor would just randomly ghost us a couple of weeks before we are ready to finish the process? Anything we should be cautious about?
by ShaMuJas