The movers had finished. The furniture was in place. Even the television had been installed and connected to the roof antenna.
So the new homeowner sat down with a sigh and a cold drink, ready to enjoy a TV show in his new house.
He clicked the "on" switch: Nothing but snow. On the roof, just brackets where the antenna used to be. The seller had taken it. "True story"
What stays and what goes when a house is sold can be a point of confusion and contention between buyers and sellers.
As a general rule, if something is attached to the house, it stays. That means built-in light fixtures, furniture, curtain rods and TV antennas. But what about a washing machine, which is connected by hoses? Or a dryer which, except for the vent, is merely plugged in like a television?
There are plenty of gray areas, which prompt real estate agents to work hard to list what goes with a house and what doesn't. For sellers and buyers, the lesson is to make sure the contract details what is included and what isn't. When in doubt, it pays to ask about specific items.
Still, things slip between the cracks and there is occasional confusion.
There are misunderstandings. "Most people try to enumerate what does and what doesn't go with a house, but boy, sometimes things pop up."
And sometimes sellers just take what they want without a care about whether it should legally stay, agents say.
Once, a seller removed every light bulb from a home before moving out. Another time, a seller removed all the recently installed paneling from the family room.
In one particularly tedious sale and closing, the seller came back to the house the day after closing and started picking the citrus fruit off the trees.
The new homeowner confronted the seller, asking her what she was doing. "She said that the fruit was hers because it grew there when she owned the house." They ran her off, but she took a couple of bags of fruit with her.
Another time when a seller left behind a giant hutch, planning to pick it up the day after closing. But by then the new owner had taken possession of it, claiming it belonged to him, and would not let the seller back on the property. The case ended up in court. It was resolved when the seller agreed to pay storage fees for the hutch to the new owner.
Chandeliers often cause problems. They often are heirlooms that sellers wouldn't think of leaving, yet they are attached light fixtures, so they traditionally would be included in the sale.
Problems occur when buyers see them and want them. It can even get to be a major sticking point in a deal if the buyer knows ahead of time that the fixture is not going to be part of the house.
Most real estate agents advise sellers to replace fixtures they don't want to sell with the house.
"If it doesn't stay with the house, get it out of the house." If they never see it, it's not a big deal to them.
Buyers should be on the alert for sellers who swap nicer appliances with lesser ones after a deal is done. Agents sometimes advise buyers to put the specific make and model of the appliances in the sales contract so they won't find that the new side-by-side refrigerator has been replaced with a 30-year-old model with metal ice trays.
Sometimes negotiating over seemingly small items becomes sport: High-end buyers and sellers can be amazingly inflexible.
What surprises you is how entrenched people become about something that is $500 or $600. When you look at it as a percentage of the whole, it's not much.
Sellers can get petty about small items because they are sentimental about their homes, and some get even more petty when they don't like the buyer. Or they might overhear the buyer talking about making changes to the house that they don't approve of.
Mirrors have caused problems for Merritt, especially ornate ones that hang in powder rooms. Such mirrors hang like pictures, so they are technically not attached to the house, but buyers frequently squeal when they move in and the mirrors are gone. Often, the problem is resolved by the seller replacing the mirror with another one that the buyer likes.
Landscaping also sometimes turns up missing when a buyer moves in. The bushes and trees are supposed to go with a house at sale ? after all, they are about as attached to the property as anything can get ? yet sellers often have emotional attachments to their plants.
I have seen them remove a whole tree, six feet tall.
Sometimes real estate agents ask the seller to return whatever they took, but often it's not worth the hassle.
In the case of the missing tree, the listing agent gave the buyers a new one as a housewarming gift. The broker forked over a bag of bulbs to the buyers who moved into the house with the empty light sockets.
Most agents have a long list of things they have bought to replace items sellers took with them. The TV antenna for one buyer. A sprinkler pump for another.
From that you learn the next time you do a contract that you write in that the TV antenna is included.
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