Answers by Zoltan Peresztegi

Two different questions here, Allison, and the answer to the first is mostly no. The answer to the second is yes, and it is the one you can actually do something about today. On the disclosure side, the agents above have already covered Florida's framework, including the Johnson v. Davis duty to disclose known material defects not readily observable. Here is the piece of context worth adding, because it explains why the answers you find online conflict so much. States are all over the map on this, and they split into roughly three camps. Some states affirmatively require disclosure of a death on the property, within a time limit. California is the clearest example. Civil Code 1710.2 requires disclosure of a death that occurred on the property within three years of the buyer's offer, treats it as a material fact, and specifically protects information about a prior occupant's HIV or AIDS-related death. Notably, even in California the statute does not let a seller lie in response to a direct question. Some states go the opposite direction and affirmatively protect sellers, stating by statute that a murder, suicide, or other death is not a material fact requiring disclosure. Florida generally sits in this camp. And some states are simply silent, which leaves you with common law and a lot of ambiguity. The term for all of this is stigmatized property, and it is worth knowing because that is the phrase that will actually get you useful search results instead of the mush you have probably been finding. The practical point that survives all of it: in almost every state, including Florida, an agent and a seller generally cannot lie to you in response to a direct question. So ask the question, in writing, and ask it specifically. Not "is there anything I should know," which invites a shrug. Something closer to: to your knowledge, has any death, violent crime, or criminal activity occurred at this property. Put it in an email. A written question creates a written record, and it changes the incentives considerably. Now, your second question, which is the practical one. How do you research crimes at a specific address? Local police or sheriff's department. Many agencies have online incident or call-for-service maps searchable by address or block. Some require a public records request, which is usually free or cheap and takes a couple of weeks. County clerk of court records. Criminal case filings are public and searchable, and they list addresses. This catches things a call map will not. Newspaper archives for the address and cross street. Local reporting is the fastest way to find anything significant that happened, and it is often free through your public library. Sex offender registries are public and searchable by address in every state. They are a separate question from what happened at the house, but people usually mean to ask about both. Neighbors. Underrated, free, and honest. Knock on three doors. One realistic expectation to set: there is no single national database that maps crimes to addresses. Anyone selling you one is selling you an aggregation of public records you can pull yourself. And a note on why any of this matters beyond peace of mind. Stigma can affect resale value and marketing time in some markets and not at all in others. If it matters to you emotionally, that is reason enough. If you are worried about value, the honest answer is that it depends heavily on the nature of the event and how long ago it was. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, and I am not an attorney. Florida's specific statutory language is worth confirming with a Florida real estate attorney before you rely on it. I do not work Tallahassee, but I am glad to connect you with a strong local agent through my network. Ask the question in writing. That is the move. Zoltan

In almost every case, Greg, this is not a material defect and it is not something you are legally required to disclose. But there is one question worth checking first, and it is not the one you are worried about. Check whether your city or county actually allows pet burial on residential property. Rules vary a lot. Some places permit it with depth and setback requirements, some restrict it, some prohibit it outright, and some say nothing at all. If your jurisdiction has a rule and the burial did not follow it, that is a different conversation than the one you came here to have. Five minutes with your county health department or municipal code will settle it. Assuming it is permitted or unaddressed, here is the framework. Disclosure duty generally runs to known material defects, meaning things that affect the value, safety, or use of the property and are not readily observable. A pet buried in the yard years ago with no marker, no odor, no contamination, and no effect on anything is not a defect. It does not change the value of the house, it does not affect the structure, and it does not impair anyone's use of the property. That is the honest legal analysis and it is why the agents above are telling you it is not required. The stigma category is where people get confused. Stigma disclosure rules exist in most states, but they are almost always about deaths of people on the property, and they usually carry a time limit. A pet is not in that category anywhere I am aware of. The one practical thing I would think about is location. Where in the yard is it, and is anything likely to get dug there? If it is out in an open section of lawn, nothing happens, ever. If it is near a septic system, a leach field, a utility easement, or the spot where somebody would logically put a pool, a foundation for an addition, or a fence line, then a buyer could conceivably hit it during work later. That is not a legal disclosure issue so much as a "you would want to know" issue. If it falls in that second category, I would mention it, and I would mention it plainly and briefly. Not on a disclosure form as a defect, just a sentence to your agent to pass along: there is a pet buried in the northwest corner of the yard. That is it. Nobody has ever walked away from a house over that, and it costs you nothing. Here is the underlying principle I would give any seller. The things that blow up after closing are almost never the thing itself. They are the discovery that the seller knew and said nothing. A buried cat is a non-event. A buried cat that the buyer finds out about and then wonders what else you did not mention is a problem you created for free. So: check the ordinance, and if it is anywhere near something that might get dug up, say one sentence. Otherwise you can let it be. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, and I am not an attorney, so if the ordinance question turns up something odd, an Indiana real estate attorney is the right call. I do not work Evansville, but I am glad to connect you with a strong local agent through my network. And I am sorry about your cat. Zoltan

Congratulations, Kathy. And here is the thing worth knowing before you set a closing date: getting married first does not automatically double your exclusion. Several people above have given you the $250,000 and $500,000 numbers correctly, but the $500,000 has a condition attached that applies directly to your situation. Barrett, Loodmy, and Cassidy laid out the basics right. You can generally exclude up to $250,000 of gain if you owned and lived in the home as your principal residence for at least two of the last five years, and up to $500,000 on a joint return. Katie is also right that this ends with your CPA. Now the condition. On a joint return, only one spouse has to meet the ownership test, but both spouses have to meet the use test. Each of you has to have used the home as a principal residence for two of the last five years to get the full $500,000. Apply that to you. Your fiance has presumably never lived in your house. So even if you marry in the spring and sell in the summer and file jointly, he does not meet the use test on your home, and your exclusion is $250,000, not $500,000. Marrying first does not change that number. It only changes it if he actually lives in your house for two years first, which is not your plan. Which means the practical answer is simpler than it looked: for your house, you are working with $250,000 of exclusion whether you sell before or after the wedding. That is not bad news, it is just worth knowing so you do not delay a sale for a benefit that is not coming. So the real question becomes whether your gain even exceeds $250,000. Do this arithmetic before you worry any further: Take your sale price, subtract selling costs including commission, then subtract your adjusted basis. Your basis is what you paid, plus capital improvements over the years, and this is the part people undercount badly. New roof, HVAC replacement, kitchen or bath remodel, additions, new windows, permanent landscaping. Those add to your basis and reduce your gain. Repairs and maintenance do not. Go find those receipts, because on a house held a long time they are often worth tens of thousands of dollars of basis. If the number after all that is under $250,000, you likely owe nothing federally and this whole worry goes away. Two more things to raise with your CPA. The two-year lookback. If you use the exclusion on this sale, you generally cannot use it again on another sale within two years. That matters because you are moving into your fiance's house, and if the two of you sell that house in the next couple of years the timing interacts. South Carolina state treatment is separate from the federal rules, and there is also federal withholding to think about if you are ever a nonresident seller. Your closing attorney will flag it. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay. I am not a CPA and none of the above is tax advice, so take it to yours before you sign anything. But go pull those improvement receipts first. That is the single highest-value hour you can spend on this. Zoltan

Get pre-approved before you look at a single house, Santiago, and the reason is not the one you have probably been told. It is not about being ready to write an offer. It is that the pre-approval process is where you find out what is wrong, and finding out early is worth months. The timing answer, plainly: start the conversation with a lender two to three months before you want to buy, and complete the pre-approval right before you start touring. Two to three months of lead time is not because the paperwork takes that long. It takes days. It is because if something needs fixing, a collection you forgot about, a thin credit file, a gap in your employment documentation, you want to know in month one, not on the day you find the house. Now the part fourteen answers here have not gotten to. Pre-approval is not one product. There are three levels and they are not close to equal. Pre-qualification. You tell a loan officer your income and they tell you a number. No documents, no verification. This is a conversation, not a commitment, and experienced listing agents know it on sight. Pre-approval. You submit income documents, assets, and they pull your credit. A real underwriting-adjacent review. This is the standard and it is fine for most markets. Pre-underwritten, sometimes called fully underwritten or credit approved. Your file has actually gone to an underwriter and come back approved subject only to the property and the appraisal. It takes longer up front and it is dramatically stronger. In a multiple offer situation it is close to a cash offer in the seller's eyes, because the only thing left is the house. Ask your lender specifically which one they are giving you. Most people receive the second and believe they have the third. Two mechanics worth knowing. Yes, you can absolutely get pre-approved while you are looking. It is just worse. You are shopping without knowing your ceiling, and the day you find the house you love is the worst possible day to start assembling pay stubs. On the credit pull. It is a hard inquiry and it will ding your score a few points temporarily. Shop lenders in a tight cluster rather than over months, because the common credit scoring models treat multiple mortgage inquiries in a short window as a single inquiry for scoring purposes. Ask each lender to pull within the same short stretch. And note that the credit report itself has a shelf life for underwriting, generally around 120 days, so if your search runs long expect to refresh it. Ask your lender what their number is. One more thing worth doing while you are at it: get pre-approved with two lenders, not one. Not to play games, just because rates and fees genuinely differ and you cannot compare a loan estimate to nothing. Compare the loan estimates side by side, same day, same loan amount. Since this question has been sitting a while, one update for anyone reading it now. Rates have moved since December 2025. As of the middle of August 2026 the Freddie Mac survey has the 30-year fixed averaging around 6.67 percent and the 15-year around 5.96 percent. Whatever you were quoted months ago is stale. Get a fresh number. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, and I am not a lender, so the specifics of your file belong to the person writing your loan. I do not work Tempe, but I am glad to help you compare what you hear, or connect you with a strong local agent through my network. Start with the lender. Everything downstream gets easier. Zoltan

The pressure you are under is not really about the house, Annalise. It is about the month. Solve the deadline first and this decision gets much easier, because right now you are being asked to accept a $25,000 gap in order to avoid being homeless, and that is not a negotiation, that is a hostage situation. Several agents above have already told you to get a structural engineer, and they are right, so I will not repeat it beyond one line: an engineer's report is not the same as a general inspector's note, it costs a few hundred dollars, and it is the only document that turns "serious foundation issues" into a scope and a number you can hold someone to. Here is what I want to add. Fix the timeline separately. You sold your house and you need to be out in a month. That is a rent-back or a short-term rental problem, not a reason to buy a house with a $25,000 shortfall. Options, roughly in order of how well they usually work: Ask your buyer for a rent-back. You stay in your old house for thirty to sixty days and pay them rent. Buyers agree to this far more often than sellers expect, especially if you offer to cover their carrying cost. Month to month rental or extended stay. Expensive and annoying, and still cheaper than $25,000. Storage plus staying with family for six weeks. Nobody's favorite, also not $25,000. Any of those buys you the ability to walk away from this house without panic. That is the leverage you are missing. On the gap itself. The seller agreed to $5,000 against roughly $30,000 of work. That tells you something useful: they are willing to move, but not much, probably because they either do not believe the number or cannot afford it. So go back with the engineer's report and a contractor bid, not with an estimate. A written bid from a licensed contractor is very hard to argue with, and it converts the conversation from "your inspector is being dramatic" to "here is what it costs." And understand your position better than you may think it is. Once you walk, that seller has a disclosure problem. In most states, a known material defect has to be disclosed to the next buyer. They now know about the mold and the foundation, in writing. The next buyer's inspector will find the same things, and the next buyer will ask for the same credit. Sellers often do not realize this until the second deal falls apart. Your agent can raise it gently. It is not a threat, it is just true. On mold and foundation specifically, so you can weigh it: mold is usually a symptom, and the number that matters is the cost of fixing the water intrusion causing it, not the remediation. Foundation issues range from a routine pier job to something that keeps getting worse forever. The engineer tells you which one you have. If the report says the movement is active and ongoing, my honest opinion is that a $25,000 credit gap is the least of your problems and you should walk. Last, check your contract dates today. If your inspection contingency window is still open you can terminate and get your earnest money back. If it has closed, your exposure changes completely and you need to know that before you take a position. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, and I am not an engineer or a contractor. I do not work Cambridge, Ohio, but I am glad to help you think it through or connect you with a strong local agent through my network. Buy the house if the engineer says the problem is finite and the seller closes most of the gap. Do not buy it because you have to be out in thirty days. Zoltan

Nobody can give you a number from a description, and the honest reason is that on a manufactured home, two homes with identical specs can be worth very different amounts depending on paperwork and land. Here is how to get to a real number instead of a guess. Start with three separate values, because they are three different things. The book value of the home. The reference is the J.D. Power manufactured housing guide, still commonly called the NADA guide or the mobile home blue book. Feed it your year, manufacturer, model, dimensions, and honest condition. A 16 by 76 has a defensible book value, and that is your floor. The land, if you own it. If you own the ground, that value is often the larger half and it is valued completely separately from the home, using land sales in your area. The local market adjustment. Book value does not know that there are four similar homes for sale within five miles, or that there are none. Only closed sales in your area tell you that. Now the part specific to what you described. That 10 by 16 enclosed and insulated porch with three large windows, two storm doors, new steps and a steel ramp is real added value, but only if two things are true. Was it permitted, and does it appear on the appraisal district record. An addition that shows up in county records adds documented square footage. An addition that does not exist on paper is often treated by an appraiser as worth little or nothing, and it can actively scare a lender. Pull your appraisal district record and see what it says your improvements are. Is the home elected as real property. In Texas that status lives on a Statement of Ownership with TDHCA, and the real property election has to be recorded with the county clerk. If it is real property, a buyer can get a normal mortgage. If it is still personal property, most buyers are paying cash or using chattel financing at higher rates, and that shows up as a lower price almost every time. The steel ramp is worth mentioning separately. Accessibility features are a genuine selling point to a specific buyer, and there are more of those buyers than people assume. Do not let an agent treat it as a negative to be removed. What I would actually do: call two or three agents in Grimes County who have closed manufactured homes on owned land in the last couple of years and ask each for the closed comparable sales they are using. Not their opinion, the comparables. If three agents show you the same four sales, you have your number. If they show you completely different sets, at least one of them does not work this property type and you have learned something. One note since this question has been sitting a while: it was asked in December 2025, and rates and local conditions have moved since. If you are still deciding, pull fresh comparables rather than relying on anything from last year. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay. I am not going to price a Texas manufactured home from California, and I would be careful with anyone who will. Happy to help you sort through what the local agents tell you, or connect you with someone through my network. Zoltan

Before anyone can price this, one question has to be answered: is the home legally real property or personal property in Texas? That single classification changes who can buy it, how they can finance it, and what it is worth, and none of the answers above have raised it. Here is what I mean. In Texas, a manufactured home's status is recorded on a Statement of Ownership with the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs. If the home has been elected as real property, that election also has to be recorded with the county clerk in the county deed records. If that has been done, the home and the land sell together as one piece of real estate and a buyer can use ordinary mortgage financing. If it has not been done, the home is personal property. It transfers through TDHCA rather than through a deed, and buyers are usually looking at chattel lending or cash. That shrinks your buyer pool substantially and it almost always shows up in the price. You can check this yourself. TDHCA has a serial number lookup online, and the Central Appraisal District record will also reflect it if the real property election was completed. It is worth ten minutes before you do anything else. If the election has not been made and you own the land, making it is often the single highest-return thing you can do before listing. Second thing, and this may be the bigger one for you. You described two large lots with water, sewer, and electric installed, plus crushed concrete drive and parking. In a lot of rural and semi-rural Texas markets, that improved land is worth more than the 16 by 76 home sitting on it. Utilities already in the ground is a real cost a buyer does not have to spend. So the pricing question is probably not "what is my mobile home worth," it is "what is improved, utility-ready acreage worth here, and does the home add to that or is it just a place for someone to live while they build." That also opens a question worth asking: are the two lots legally separate parcels with their own parcel numbers? If they are, selling them separately or selling one and keeping one may net you more than selling the package. Your appraisal district records will tell you. For the home itself, the starting reference is the J.D. Power manufactured housing guide, the one most people still call the NADA guide or the mobile home blue book. That gives you a book value based on year, size, model, and condition. Treat it as a floor and a sanity check, not as an answer, because it does not know anything about your land, your utilities, or your local demand. I will be straight with you: I am not going to guess a number. I am a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, not in Grimes County, and anybody who gives you a price for this sight unseen from another state is making it up. What you want is a local agent who has actually closed manufactured homes on owned land in your area, because that is a different skill from selling stick-built houses, and plenty of good agents do not have it. Three questions to ask when you interview them: how many manufactured homes on owned land have you closed in the last two years, is my home currently elected as real property, and would you list the lots together or separately. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I am glad to help you think through the approach or point you toward someone through my network. Start with the Statement of Ownership. Everything else depends on it. Zoltan

Jackie, first, the thing nobody has said to you: your age cannot be used against you. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibits lenders from denying credit or shortening a loan term because of age. A lender cannot tell you that you are too old for a 30 year mortgage. If one implies it, that is a compliance problem on their end, not a limitation on you. I hold the SRES designation, Seniors Real Estate Specialist, and this is the single most common thing older buyers are wrongly told. I want you to walk in knowing that. Now the real barriers, which are the 540 and the down payment, not the 70. Barrett and Kevin already covered the FHA credit tiers accurately, so I will not repeat them. What I will add is the part that matters practically: even though FHA's floor is 500, most lenders layer on their own overlays and want 620 to 640. So a 540 is not a hard no, but it means you have to shop, and credit unions and smaller lenders are far more likely to work at the FHA floor than a large retail bank. Here is what I would do in the next 90 days. Get to 580. That is the number that changes everything, because it moves you from 10 percent down to 3.5 percent down. Forty points is very achievable in two to three months. Pull all three reports free at annualcreditreport.com and dispute every error, and errors are common. Then attack utilization, because it is the fastest lever. Pay revolving balances below 30 percent of each card's limit, and below 10 percent if you can. Scores typically move within one or two billing cycles. Do not close old accounts, that shortens your credit history. Do not open anything new. And if there is a collection, ask whether it can be resolved rather than assuming it cannot. Check USDA on specific addresses. If you are in Bentonville, Arkansas, much of the state is USDA eligible, and USDA Guaranteed requires no down payment at all. Eligibility is address by address, so run each property through the USDA eligibility map rather than going by the town name. USDA lenders generally want 640, which is another reason the credit work comes first. Call your state housing finance agency. If you are in Arkansas that is the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, ADFA, which administers the down payment assistance and first time buyer programs there. Every state has one and they all run something similar, so if I have your state wrong, search for your own state's housing finance agency and the advice is identical. Get their current program terms and their participating lender list directly from them, and apply with a lender from that list, because assistance usually cannot be added to a loan after the fact. Two things that work in your favor and that you should raise with a lender. Six years of on time rent is real evidence, and some loan programs allow a documented rental payment history as a compensating factor. Ask about it specifically. And if you draw Social Security or a pension, some programs let non taxable income be grossed up, which raises your qualifying income without raising your actual income. Free help: HUD approved housing counselors will build this plan with you at no cost and are not selling you a loan. The line is 800-569-4287. One honest note. You asked this in late 2025 and rates have moved since, so redo the payment math with a current pre-approval before you commit to a price. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, SRES, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, so your area is not my market. If you want, I will connect you with an agent in my referral network there. But the first 90 days of this is credit work and phone calls, and you can start that today without anyone's help. Zoltan

Chris and Nicole already pointed you at the two right things, the HUD 100 dollar down option and Georgia Dream, so let me add the mechanics, because that is where people get stuck. To bid on a HUD home at all, you need a licensed real estate professional registered with HUD who holds a NAID, a Name Address Identifier. You can browse hudhomestore.com yourself for free, but you cannot submit a bid. So when you call agents in Henry and Clayton County, ask one question first: are you HUD registered, do you have a NAID number. It is yes or no and it will save you a month. Second thing worth knowing about the 100 dollar down program: it is not automatic and not every FHA lender offers it. It applies to HUD owned properties, requires FHA financing, and is limited to owner occupants. Some lenders simply do not do it. So call three FHA lenders and ask specifically whether they originate HUD 100 dollar down, before you get attached to a property. Third, timing. HUD gives owner occupant buyers a priority bidding window before investors can bid. That window is the reason to be pre-approved and NAID-registered before you find a house rather than after. If you are scrambling for a pre-approval when the right listing appears, you will lose it to somebody who was ready. On Georgia Dream: it is real, it is administered by the Georgia Department of Community Affairs, and the assistance is a zero interest deferred second rather than a gift, meaning it is repaid when you sell or refinance. First time buyer there means you have not owned a home in the past three years. The important part for you is that the income limits are county specific and metro Atlanta counties including Clayton and Henry run considerably lower than the statewide figures you will see quoted. Get the current numbers straight from DCA, because they are updated at least annually and any article, including this one, goes stale. One option nobody mentioned. Check USDA eligibility on the specific addresses you are considering. Parts of the outer Atlanta metro qualify, USDA requires no down payment at all, and it is not limited to HUD inventory. It is address by address, so run each property through the USDA eligibility map rather than assuming based on the town. Practical order of operations: get pre-approved with an FHA lender who does 100 dollar down and is on the Georgia Dream participating lender list, find a NAID registered agent, then shop. All three before you fall in love with a house. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, so I am not licensed in Georgia and would not pretend to know the Stockbridge and Jonesboro streets. If you would like, I will connect you with an agent in my referral network down there who does HUD and Georgia Dream work. Zoltan

Robert, here is the whole thing in three steps, in order. Most people do them backwards and it costs them. Step one, this week. Pull all three of your credit reports for free at annualcreditreport.com. That is the federally authorized site and it does not cost anything. Read them for errors, because errors are common and disputing them is free. Then look at your balances. Credit utilization, meaning how much of each card's limit you are using, moves scores faster than almost anything else, and paying a card down below thirty percent of its limit can lift your score in one or two billing cycles. Do not close old accounts, that usually hurts. Do not open new ones. Step two, before you look at a single house. Get a real pre-approval from a lender, and do it in this order, because the order matters. First, go to your state housing finance agency's website and see what first time buyer and down payment assistance programs exist where you live. Note which lenders are on their participating lender list. Then get pre-approved with one of those lenders. Doing it the other way around is the most common expensive mistake I see, because many assistance programs cannot be added onto a loan after the fact, and you will find out too late. Applying to three lenders is fine. Credit scoring models treat multiple mortgage inquiries within a short window as a single event, so shopping does not wreck your score. What the lender will look at: your credit score, your debt to income ratio counting every monthly obligation plus the new house payment, your employment history, and your documented funds. Have two years of tax returns, recent pay stubs and two months of bank statements ready and you will move fast. Step three, then shop. Get a buyer's agent. Since August 2024 you will sign a written representation agreement before touring, so ask for a short initial term and a clear cancellation clause. Two things to hold onto. Budget beyond the down payment, for closing costs, inspections you pay for whether or not you buy the house, and reserves left over after closing. And from the moment you go under contract until the day you close, do not open a credit card, do not finance furniture, do not change jobs. Lenders re-pull credit right before closing and deals die there every month for exactly this. If you want free help walking through all of it, HUD approved housing counselors do this at no cost and are not selling you anything. The line is 800-569-4287. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, and first time buyers are a big part of what I do. Tell me where you are looking and I will help directly if it is my area or connect you with someone good in my network if it is not. Zoltan

Yes, you can sell it. Houses with unpermitted work sell every single day. What you cannot do is hide it, and the risk you are probably not thinking about is not the buyer, it is the appraiser and the lender. Start with disclosure, because that part is not optional and it is the part that creates real liability. In nearly every state you must disclose known material facts about the property, and unpermitted structural or system work is squarely material. In California, for example, that means the Transfer Disclosure Statement, and the Seller Property Questionnaire has a paragraph specifically asking about permitted status, paragraph 8E as of the December 2024 form update. Your state will have its own version. Disclose it plainly. Say what was done, roughly when, and that permits were not pulled. Do not characterize the quality of the work, yours or anyone's. Just state the facts. The reason to be scrupulous here is that failure to disclose is the thing that gets sellers sued years after closing, and in most states the clock on that claim runs from discovery, not from the sale. Now the practical damage, which is where it actually costs you money. Square footage. Appraisers generally exclude unpermitted space from gross living area. If you converted a garage or finished a basement without permits, that space very likely will not count in the appraisal, which means it will not count toward the value even though the buyer can see it and walk in it. Financing. Lenders generally will not lend against value attributed to unpermitted work, and on some loan types an appraiser flagging it can create a condition that has to be cleared before closing. Practically, this narrows your buyer pool toward cash buyers and buyers with larger down payments. Insurance. Worth mentioning to yourself and to your buyer. Carriers have denied claims on damage originating in unpermitted work. It is not universal, but it is real. Your three options, and the right one depends on your local building department more than on anything else. Sell as is with full disclosure. Simplest, and you accept a smaller buyer pool and probably a lower number. Permit it retroactively, sometimes called as-built permitting. Cost and difficulty vary enormously by jurisdiction. Some cities are routine about it, others require you to open walls for inspection. Call your building department before you list and ask what an as-built permit for that scope would involve. That one phone call decides your strategy. Remove or reverse it. Occasionally the cheapest path if the work is small and it is creating a bigger discount than it is worth. One thing not to do. Do not describe the space in the listing in a way that implies it is permitted. Do not list a converted garage as a bedroom in the bedroom count. That is where disclosure failures turn into misrepresentation claims, and it is your agent's exposure as well as yours. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney or a building official. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I work throughout Los Angeles and the South Bay, where unpermitted garage conversions and additions are extremely common and there are usually workable paths. If you are in my area, I am glad to look at what you are dealing with. Zoltan

It depends on how it is attached, and the answer you want is decided by what you do before you get an offer, not after. The general rule everywhere is the fixture test. If it is permanently attached to the land it conveys with the house. If it sits loose it is personal property and it is yours. In practice, courts and contracts look at three things: how it is attached, whether it was adapted to the property, and what a reasonable buyer would have expected. Applied to sheds, roughly. Bolted to a concrete slab or footings, or on a poured foundation: fixture, it conveys. Wired for electricity or plumbed for water: almost always a fixture, and the wiring is what does it. Sitting on skids, gravel or blocks, movable with equipment: usually personal property, but this is exactly the gray zone people fight about. Permitted as a structure and on the tax record: treat it as a fixture regardless of attachment. You said you built it a couple of years ago and it is nice. Nice matters here, because a shed a buyer can see in the listing photos is a shed the buyer thinks they are buying. That expectation is half the fixture test. So here is the sequence that keeps this from becoming a problem. Exclude it in the listing, before any offer comes in. Not in conversation, in writing. Tell your agent to put it in the MLS remarks and in the exclusions section of the listing paperwork, and to add a line to the seller disclosures. In California the purchase agreement has explicit fixtures and personal property paragraphs and the exclusion belongs there. Whatever your state uses, it has an equivalent, and the excluded item has to be named specifically. Then decide whether to remove it before or after listing. Before is cleaner and I usually recommend it. If you leave it standing and it appears in your photos, some buyer will write an offer partly because of it and you will be renegotiating in escrow. If it stays until closing, do two things. Get the removal terms in writing, including who repairs the slab or the yard and by when. And photograph the pad, the yard and the utility connections after removal, because move out condition disputes are decided by photographs. One wrinkle to expect. If the shed was included in the appraisal and you then remove it, the lender can require a reinspection. Tell your agent early so it is disclosed up front rather than discovered three days before closing. And a practical alternative: sometimes the buyer wants it. If so, sell it to them on a separate bill of sale for a stated amount rather than folding it into the purchase price. Cleaner for everyone, and it keeps the appraisal and the loan out of it. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay. Nine out of ten fights about this happen because somebody assumed instead of writing it down. Write it down and take your shed. Zoltan

The single most useful thing to understand is that outbuildings never count toward your square footage, and that surprises almost every seller. Gross living area, the number buyers compare, means finished, heated and cooled living space above grade in the main dwelling. A detached workshop or barn is not in it no matter how nice it is. Outbuildings show up elsewhere in the appraisal as a separate line adjustment, and that adjustment is contributory value, meaning what the market will actually pay for it, not what it cost you to build. Those two numbers are usually far apart, and the gap is bigger the more custom the structure. So what makes yours worth more than the falling down one down the street. Four things, roughly in order. Permits and legal status. This is the big one. If the structure was permitted and appears on the tax assessor's record, an appraiser can support value for it and a lender can lend against it. If it was not permitted, most appraisers will note it and many lenders will not attribute value to it at all. That is not about quality, it is about lendability. If you have permits, pull the records now. If you do not, ask your local building department what retroactive permitting would involve before you list, because doing it after you have an offer is the worst possible time. Utilities and conditioning. Power, water and a concrete slab move an outbuilding from shed to workshop in an appraiser's eyes. Insulated and climate controlled moves it again. Note exactly what each building has. Buyer pool. Here is the honest part. Outbuildings narrow your market more than they widen it. A buyer who wants a workshop pays a premium. A buyer who does not sees maintenance and a roof they will have to replace. On a well maintained set of buildings that usually nets positive, but it means the right buyer matters more than the right price. That is a marketing problem, and it is solvable. Documentation. Before you list, do this. Photograph the interior of every building, not just the exterior. Write down for each one: dimensions, year built, foundation type, roof age, whether it has power and water, and whether it is permitted. Check your homeowners policy for what is listed as a scheduled structure. Then hand that page to your appraiser at the door and give it to your listing agent for the MLS remarks. Appraisers can only credit what they can see and support, and most sellers never give them anything to work with. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, where detached structures usually mean ADUs and garage conversions rather than barns, but the permitting logic is identical. If you want a second read on your specific buildings, I am happy to help. Zoltan

Hi Mera, Yes to both questions, with a strategy note. Can you tour it? Usually. "Contingent" means the seller accepted an offer but the buyer is still clearing hurdles (inspection, appraisal, loan). Many sellers keep allowing showings precisely because deals at this stage still fall apart. Have your agent call the listing agent and ask; the worst answer is no, and the call itself tells your agent how solid the current deal is. Can you make an offer? Yes, as a backup offer. Here is how it works and why it is worth doing on a house you love: - A backup offer is a signed agreement that automatically becomes THE contract if the first buyer cancels. You are first in line, and the seller cannot shop your position. - It costs you little: you are typically free to keep shopping and can withdraw before the first deal cancels (have your agent confirm the withdrawal terms in your backup agreement). - It changes the psychology of the first deal. A buyer who knows a backup exists asks for less in repair negotiations, and a seller with a backup in hand is less likely to make concessions that keep a shaky deal alive. Sometimes the backup offer itself is what shakes the first deal loose. One caution: fall in line, not in love. Most contingent deals do close, so keep touring other homes while your backup sits. If it comes back around, you win; if not, you have not lost weeks waiting. I am a real estate professional serving Los Angeles' South Bay, including the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If you would like an introduction to a sharp San Diego agent from my network to make that call for you, happy to connect. Zoltan

Mike, two questions in one, and the second is worth more money than the first. Let me do the Florida side first because it has an actual deadline. Florida has a homestead exemption that meaningfully reduces your property tax, and on top of it the Save Our Homes cap, which limits how much your assessed value can rise each year once you have it. The Save Our Homes cap is 2.7 percent for 2026, and for 2026 the standard homestead exemption reduces taxable assessed value by up to 51,411 dollars. Here is the trap. You must own and occupy the Florida home as your permanent residence as of January 1 to qualify for that tax year, and you have to file the application by March 1. Miss January 1 by a single day and you wait a full year. Late filing is possible into early September but only on a showing of extenuating circumstances, and it is not something to count on. So if you can reasonably close on the Florida home and be in it before January 1, do that. It is worth structuring your timeline around. One thing to set expectations on: Save Our Homes portability, which lets you carry up to 500,000 dollars of accumulated assessment savings to a new home, only works between two Florida homesteads. Coming from out of state, you start fresh. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. Now the timing question. For most of the country the highest price window is late spring, roughly the stretch from March into June, driven by school calendars and weather. Sellers listing then generally see more buyers and stronger offers. But national seasonality is a weak signal compared to what is happening on your street. Ask your agent for three numbers on your specific neighborhood and price band: current active inventory, months of supply, and the list to sale price ratio for the last ninety days. If inventory is tight in your range right now, waiting for spring may hand you more competition rather than more buyers. And sequencing matters more than the calendar here. You are selling in one state and buying in another. Decide early whether you can carry both for a period, or whether you need the sale to fund the purchase. If it is the latter, ask your lender about a bridge loan or a recast, and be very careful about accepting a sale contingency on the Florida side, because Florida sellers in most markets do not love them. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, and I am not licensed in Florida. If you tell me the two markets, the one you are leaving and the part of Florida you are heading to, I will connect you with agents in my referral network on both ends who can coordinate the timing between them. That coordination is the part that usually goes wrong. Zoltan

Ryann, your discomfort is data. Trust it more than the number. Here is what the pre-approval actually measured. Your lender took your gross monthly income, before taxes, before your 401k, before health insurance, and compared it to your documented monthly debts, meaning things that show up on a credit report. Then they applied a maximum debt to income ratio, the DTI, usually the back end ratio that counts every debt plus the new housing payment. Look at what that calculation never saw. Childcare. Groceries, gas, phone, internet, streaming. Retirement contributions. Car maintenance, and the car you will eventually need to replace. Travel, gifts, the dentist. And anything you pay in cash. None of that is on a credit report, so none of it constrained your approval. The pre-approval is a regulatory ceiling, not a budget. It answers what is the most this lender is permitted to lend you, not what should you spend. So run this test instead. Take the full payment at 475,000, principal, interest, property taxes, homeowners insurance, mortgage insurance if applicable, and HOA dues if any. Subtract what you currently pay for housing. Take that difference and move it into a separate savings account every month for three months. Do not touch it. If that is uncomfortable in month two, you have your answer, and you also have a down payment cushion either way. This is the single most useful exercise I give buyers and it takes ninety days and zero dollars. Two more things to weigh. Reserves. After closing, how many months of full payment do you have left in the bank? I would want three at an absolute minimum and six if the income is variable or commission based. A buyer who closes with nothing left is a buyer whose water heater becomes a crisis. Payment shock. If your housing payment is jumping more than about forty percent over what you pay now, that is a real strain regardless of what the ratios say. Underwriters watch for this on some loan programs for exactly that reason. Buying at the top of your approval is not automatically wrong. It is right for people whose income is rising predictably and who have reserves. It goes badly for everyone else, and the market does not care which one you were. I am a real estate professional, not a financial advisor, so this is information rather than a recommendation about your finances. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I work with buyers throughout Los Angeles and the South Bay. I would rather help someone buy comfortably at the number that lets them sleep than at the number a calculator produced. Zoltan

Cheryl, yes, you can pause, and there are three different ways to do it that look similar and are not. Pick the right one or you will pay for it in cumulative days on market. The three statuses, in rough order of how much they cost you. Temporarily off market, sometimes called hold or hold do not show. The listing stays with your agent, comes off public search, and showings stop. In most MLSs the days on market clock keeps running while you are in this status. It is the lightest touch and it is usually right for a two week holiday break. Withdrawn. The listing is pulled from active status but your listing agreement stays in force. Depending on your MLS, days on market may pause or may continue. Cancelled. The listing agreement itself is terminated. This is the clean break, and it is the only one that reliably resets days on market when you relist, and even then only if you stay off market long enough. Here is the part that actually matters. Most MLSs track cumulative days on market, CDOM, which follows a property across relists within a set window. That window is commonly somewhere between 30 and 90 days but it is set locally and it varies a lot. So the trick people think they are pulling, cancel and relist at zero days, often does not work. Ask your agent to tell you the exact CDOM rule in your MLS before you choose a status. That one question is the whole decision. Two mechanics worth knowing. Whatever you change, get it in writing rather than by text. In California, modifying the price or expiration on an existing listing is done on the C.A.R. Modification of Terms, Listing Agreement, the MT-LA, and keeping a property out of the MLS entirely uses the Seller Instruction to Exclude Listing from MLS, the SELM. Your state will have equivalents. Now the part you did not ask. Three weeks with no sale is not necessarily a reason to pause. It is usually a pricing signal, and pausing does not fix pricing, it just delays finding out. Before you go on hold, ask for showing counts, feedback and where your price sits against what has closed and gone pending since you listed. And on holidays specifically: holiday buyers are fewer but they are far more serious. Nobody tours houses in late December for entertainment. Inventory drops too, so your competition thins out at the same time. Sitting out the holidays is a real strategy, but it is a strategy, not a default. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay. If you want a second read on whether this is a pricing problem or a timing problem, I am glad to look. Zoltan

It sounds like you have already found someone who is working out, and honestly that is the whole game. If an agent is showing you homes across Birch Bay, Custer and Ferndale and staying responsive while you narrow it down, keep them. A couple of things worth doing anyway, since you are in it. Ask your agent to put their read of the Whatcom County market in writing for the specific areas you are comparing. Days on market, list to sale price ratio, and how many homes are currently active in your price range in each town. Those three numbers will tell you more about where you have negotiating room than any amount of driving around will. Second, whatever you signed to get started, look at the term and the cancellation clause once. Not because anything is wrong, just so you know what you agreed to. Buyers sign these quickly now and rarely read them. And if you end up selling something to buy, get the sale side priced by someone who is not the same person telling you what to offer on the purchase. Not because of any bad faith, just because two sets of eyes on the numbers is cheap. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, so northwest Washington is well outside my area and I would not pretend otherwise. If your current agent ever stops being the right fit, tell me and I will connect you with someone solid in Whatcom County from my referral network. Zoltan

Yes, this is doable, and it is very common. But there are three separate things going on and the answers are different for each. Who is on the loan. If the loan is in your name only, the lender underwrites your income, your credit and your debt ratios. Your mom's willingness to pay does not count as your income. If you cannot qualify on your own, there are two real paths. She can be a non-occupant co-borrower, meaning she is on the loan and on title with you but does not live there. FHA and Fannie Mae both allow this within program rules. Or, if the structure fits, ask a lender about Fannie Mae's Family Opportunity provision, which in certain parent and child situations lets a purchase be treated as owner occupied rather than as an investment property. That matters a lot because it means a better rate and a lower down payment. It is fact specific, so ask a lender to look at your exact situation. Who is on title. Title and the loan are separate documents and they do not have to match. You can be on title alone even if she is on the loan, though the lender will have opinions and you should ask before you assume. If you want it all in your name, say so in the first conversation with the lender, not at the closing table. How the money moves. This is where people get sloppy. If she is gifting you the down payment, the lender will require a gift letter stating it is a gift with no expectation of repayment, plus documentation of the transfer. That part is routine. On taxes, the 2026 federal annual gift tax exclusion is 19,000 dollars per recipient, or 38,000 from a married couple electing to split gifts. Going above that does not create a tax bill for almost anyone. It means she files a Form 709 and the excess counts against her lifetime exemption, which is 15 million dollars in 2026. Filing is the obligation, not paying. If she is making the monthly payment on an ongoing basis, that is also a gift each year, and the same annual exclusion applies. Also know that the mortgage interest deduction generally belongs to the person who is legally obligated on the debt and who actually pays it, so if she is paying and you are on the loan, sort that out with a tax preparer rather than guessing. One thing to be careful about. Do not sign an occupancy certification saying you will live in the home if you will not. Occupancy misrepresentation is mortgage fraud and it is one of the few things in this business with real criminal exposure. Structure it honestly and there is a legitimate product for almost every version of this. I am a real estate professional, not a CPA or a lender, so run the tax piece past a tax preparer and the loan piece past a good loan officer before you commit. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I work with buyers across Los Angeles and the South Bay, including a lot of parent and adult child purchases. Happy to help if you are in my area, or to connect you with someone in my network if you are not. Zoltan

Bette, no, you are almost certainly not stuck, and yes, you can see houses without that agent. Let me take both. First, go read the agreement you signed. Not all of it, just four things. The term. Many are 30, 60 or 90 days. Some are longer. If yours is short, you may simply be able to let it expire. The geographic scope. A lot of buyer agreements are limited to a county, a city, or a defined area. If you look outside that area, the agreement does not follow you. The property type. Some are limited to single family residential. A condo or a multi unit purchase may fall outside it. The cancellation and protection period clauses. Cancellation tells you how to get out. The protection period says that if you buy a property that agent showed or introduced you to within a certain window after termination, compensation is still owed. That last one is the only real trap, and it is where procuring cause disputes come from. So when you request a release, ask the broker to either waive the protection period or list the exact addresses it applies to. Written and specific. A vague release does not protect you. Request the release from the broker of record or office manager, not from the agent. The agreement is with the brokerage, and the broker is the one with authority. Most brokerages will sign a mutual release rather than force an unhappy buyer through the term, because a resentful client is worth nothing to them. On seeing houses without an agent: yes, you can. You can attend public open houses, you can call listing agents directly, you can go to new construction sales offices. Two cautions. At an open house, if you signed in and toured with the listing agent, that can later become a procuring cause argument if you buy that house. And at new construction, the on site salesperson works for the builder, not for you, and most builders require your agent to be present and registered on your very first visit or they will not recognize representation later. If you might want an agent for a new build, do not walk in alone the first time. For context, since August 2024 buyers nationwide sign a written agreement before touring, so this is not something you can avoid going forward. What you can do is negotiate it. In California the form is the C.A.R. Buyer Representation and Broker Compensation Agreement. Whatever form your state uses, ask for a 30 day initial term and a clean cancellation clause the next time around. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay. I am glad to look at the specific language with you if you want to paste in the term and cancellation sections. Zoltan

You asked for all the factors. I am going to give you the order instead, because the order is what people get wrong and it is what costs them. Step one, and do this before you look at a single house. Pull your actual credit reports from all three bureaus and get a real pre-approval from a lender, not an online estimate. A pre-approval means a human underwriter looked at your income documents, your credit and your debts. A pre-qualification means you filled out a form. Only one of them gets your offer taken seriously. The lender is going to look at two ratios. Your front end ratio is the housing payment against your gross monthly income. Your back end ratio, which matters more, is every monthly debt payment including the new mortgage against gross income. If you have a car payment and student loans, they are eating into your house before you start. Paying down a card can move your approval more than saving another two thousand dollars. Step two, understand the real cash number. The down payment is not the number. Budget for all of this. The down payment itself. Closing costs, generally in the range of two to five percent of the purchase price depending on your state and loan type. Inspections, which you pay for out of pocket regardless of whether you buy the house. Reserves, meaning money left over after closing. Some loan programs require it and every sane buyer should have it anyway. The first year of homeownership. Something breaks. It always does. Ask your lender for a Loan Estimate on a sample purchase price. That document breaks out every fee and it is standardized across lenders, which makes it the only honest way to compare two loan offers. Step three, then look at houses. Get a buyer's agent, and since August 2024 you will sign a written representation agreement before touring. Ask for a short initial term and a clear cancellation clause. Two things nobody tells first time buyers. First, ask about down payment assistance through your state housing finance agency before you commit to a loan, because some programs require you to use an approved lender from day one and you cannot bolt it on later. Second, from the day you go under contract until the day you close, do not open a credit card, do not finance furniture, do not change jobs. Lenders re-pull credit right before closing and deals die there every month. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, and first time buyers are a big part of my practice. Tell me where you are buying and I will either help you directly or connect you with someone good in my network. Zoltan

You are not being ignored. You are running into a structural issue, and once you can name it the search gets much easier. A manufactured home in a park, sitting on leased space rather than land you own, is in most states personal property, not real estate. It is titled more like a vehicle than a house. Many agents have never done one, their errors and omissions coverage may not contemplate it, and the commission on a park home is small relative to the work. So they either say no or they simply do not call back, because the reason is awkward to explain in thirty seconds. Here is how it works in California, which will give you the shape of it even if you live elsewhere. Manufactured homes are titled through the Department of Housing and Community Development, HCD, not the county recorder. Under Business and Professions Code 10131.6 a licensed real estate professional may sell a manufactured home as long as it is HCD registered, and 10131.7 specifically contemplates homes in place on rented or leased space in an established mobilehome park. So in California it is permitted, it is just specialized. When a manufactured home is permanently affixed to land the owner holds, a recorded form 433A converts it to real property and it then sells like any other house. Yours has not made that conversion, so it stays personal property. Your state will have its own version of this, usually run through a manufactured housing division or the motor vehicle agency. Who to call, in this order. Manufactured home dealers and specialized agents in your area. Search manufactured home dealer plus your state and ask specifically whether they list resale homes in parks. Many do, and it is their actual specialty rather than a favor. Your park manager. Parks very often keep a list of homes for sale and have a preferred dealer or agent. They also have to approve your buyer for tenancy, so involving them early prevents a dead deal at the finish line. Your state manufactured housing association. One phone call and they will tell you who is licensed for this where you live. Real estate agents who explicitly advertise manufactured and mobile home sales. They exist. They are just a small subset and they do not surface in a generic search. Two things to have ready, because they speed everything up: your certificate of title, and a copy of your space lease showing the current rent and any transfer or buyer approval requirements. Buyers and their lenders ask for both immediately, and honestly the space rent is often the single largest factor in what your home sells for. One financing note that will help you price realistically: buyers of homes on leased land generally cannot get a conventional mortgage. They use chattel loans, where rates are higher and terms are shorter. That narrows your buyer pool and it is worth knowing before you set a number. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay. If you are in my area I can point you straight to the right people. If you are not, tell me your state and I will help you find the association to call. Zoltan

Two questions here and the answers are different. Was it a conflict of interest? In substance, probably yes, though not in the technical sense the industry uses. Dual agency is a defined term. It means one agent, or one company, representing both sides. That is not what happened to you. Two agents at what I assume are two different companies who happen to be former in-laws is not dual agency. But nearly every state's agency law, and the REALTOR code of ethics on top of it, requires an agent to disclose material facts and any personal or family interest that could compromise their loyalty to you. A former brother in law on the other side of your transaction is precisely the relationship most managing agents would instruct an agent to disclose in writing before writing the offer. In California, for reference, agency relationships and duties are set out at Civil Code sections 2079.13 through 2079.24 and confirmed on the C.A.R. Disclosure Regarding Real Estate Agency Relationships form. The specifics vary by state, but the underlying fiduciary duty of undivided loyalty and full disclosure to your principal is what a close family relationship potentially puts at risk. Was it enough to void the contract? Almost certainly not on its own, and I would rather be straight with you than encouraging. Rescission generally requires showing actual harm, and typically fraud, material misrepresentation, or a breach that cost you money. They were related and did not tell me is a disclosure failure. It becomes a case when you can connect it to something concrete: you overpaid relative to what your agent knew, a repair request got quietly softened, a competing offer was never presented, your maximum price crossed over to the other side. The practical path. Write down what specifically went wrong in the transaction, separate from the relationship. Price, repairs, timing, anything you learned after closing. Request your complete transaction file from your agent's company. You are entitled to your documents. Complain in writing to the managing agent of record first. Supervising licensees carry liability for the agents under them and this often produces a fast, serious response. Then, if warranted, your state real estate commission and your local REALTOR association ethics panel. Both are free to file and independent of any court claim. Talk to a real estate attorney about damages before your statute of limitations runs. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney, and this one is genuinely a legal question. But for what it is worth, that disclosure is easy to make and costs nothing. When an agent skips it, understanding why is usually worthwhile. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay. Zoltan

William, Your agent is mostly right about the first part and clearly wrong about the second. On whether open houses sell houses: they rarely do, directly. NAR's annual buyer survey has shown for years that buyers overwhelmingly find the home they actually buy online or through their agent, not by wandering into an open house. Most open house traffic is neighbors, people who are six months out, and buyers who are not approved yet. Your buyer is almost certainly coming from a scheduled showing that a buyer agent booked off the MLS. But no sign-in sheet is not a defensible position, and the reason has nothing to do with lead generation. It is your house. Strangers are walking unescorted through your bedrooms while one agent stands in the kitchen. That sheet is the only record of who was inside your home. If something goes missing, it is what you and your insurance carrier have to work with. I would not hold an open house without one and I do not know an experienced listing agent who would. Second, it is how feedback happens. Without names you cannot follow up, and follow up is where the occasional open house buyer actually comes from. It is also how you find out that six different people said the same thing about the kitchen, which is information you need for pricing. No flyers is a smaller thing, but it points in the same direction. It suggests the open house is being held to check a box rather than to accomplish something. So I would not fight about whether to hold open houses. I would redirect the conversation to what actually moves a listing. Ask your agent for these in writing. - Your listing's view count and saves on the major portals, week over week - How many showings you have had and what the feedback was - Which agents showed it, and whether they were called afterward - Where your price sits against everything that has closed and gone pending since you listed If the only answer to how is my listing performing is we did an open house, then the open house is not really the problem. Ask the bigger question. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay. I hold open houses for specific reasons on specific listings, and I can always say what the reason is. If your agent cannot, that is fair to raise. Zoltan

William, your agent is broadly right about open houses and still wrong about how he is running them, and those are two separate issues. Let me take the second one first, because it is the one you actually asked about. There is no defensible reason to hold an open house without capturing who walked in. None. Registration does three things for you: it gives your agent someone to follow up with, it gives you a record of traffic so you can tell a slow weekend from a busy one, and it is a basic security measure, since you are inviting strangers into your home and you should know who came. Running an open house with no sign in is a two hour event that produces no information, and information is most of what you are paying for. Ask him to switch to digital registration. A QR code on a sign by the door, or a tablet on the counter, and most people fill it in without friction because it looks routine. Paper sheets get ignored, walk off with someone, or become illegible. Then ask him for the list, plus a short written recap after each one: how many groups came through, what they said about price, and what they said about the condition. That recap is the actual product of an open house, and you are entitled to it. Now, on whether they work. Your agent's underlying point has real data behind it. According to the National Association of Realtors' Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, only about 4 percent of buyers found the home they bought through a yard sign or an open house sign, while roughly 52 percent found it online. That share has been low and stable for years. So as a way of producing the eventual buyer, an open house is a long shot, and an agent who tells you that is being honest rather than lazy. But that is not the whole case, and here is where I would push back on treating them as pointless. An open house on the first weekend is worth doing almost regardless of the odds. Your listing gets its largest burst of online attention in the first several days, and an open house converts some of that attention into bodies in the house while interest is at its peak. It also concentrates traffic, which occasionally creates the useful impression among visiting buyers that other people are interested. The feedback is worth real money to you. Twenty strangers walking your house and all wincing at the same thing tells you something no amount of online activity will. That is how you find out in week one that the price is off, or that the odor you stopped noticing is the first thing everyone notices. Weekly open houses after the first two or three weekends are a different matter. That is where the "waste of time" verdict usually becomes correct, and where you are mostly hosting neighbors while your agent collects contacts. Which brings me to the uncomfortable but fair thing to name: open houses are also a lead generation tool for agents. That is not automatically wrong, and the interests genuinely overlap, but it does mean an agent's enthusiasm for holding them is not by itself evidence they help you. So here is what I would ask for, concretely. Hold one on the first weekend, with digital registration and a written recap. Hold a second the following weekend if traffic was strong. After that, judge by attendance rather than habit. And if he holds them, he registers people, every time, no exceptions. One honest caveat. Whether open houses are worth it varies a lot by price point and by whether the house is occupied. At the top of a market, or on a vacant home, or in a neighborhood with heavy foot traffic, the calculation shifts, sometimes considerably. If your agent has a market-specific reason for his position, ask him for it. A good answer will sound like your neighborhood. A bad one will sound like a general opinion. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, including the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Torrance, Redondo Beach and San Pedro, and I register every visitor at every open house I hold and send the seller a recap the same evening. If you are in this area I am glad to tell you what I would expect from your first weekend. Elsewhere, tell me where you are and I will connect you with a strong agent in my network. Zoltan

Walter, I want to answer the question you asked and then the question underneath it. On refinancing: no, and this part is important. Your 4.7 percent is a good rate. As of the week of August 13, 2026, Freddie Mac's survey put the average 30 year fixed at 6.67 percent. Refinancing today would raise your interest rate by roughly two full points. The only way that produces a lower monthly payment is by stretching you back out to a fresh 30 year term, which erases the ten years of principal you have already paid down and costs you an enormous amount in total interest. When you asked this in late 2025 the picture was much the same, so this has not been a refinance window for anyone sitting in the fours. Here is what actually works when the payment is the problem. Loan modification. This is the right tool when income has dropped. Call your servicer and ask for loss mitigation. They can extend the term, reduce the rate, or move missed payments to the back of the loan. Servicers of federally backed loans have real obligations here. Ask specifically what modification and forbearance options your loan type qualifies for, and call before you miss a payment, not after. Your options are meaningfully better while you are still current. Check your escrow before anything else. A surprising share of my payment went up is not the loan at all, it is property taxes and homeowners insurance. Insurance premiums have climbed hard in a lot of markets. Pull your most recent escrow analysis and shop the policy. I have watched clients take two to four hundred dollars a month off the payment this way without touching the loan. Recasting. If you can come up with a lump sum, a recast applies it to principal and reamortizes the loan at your existing 4.7 percent, permanently lowering the payment while keeping the good rate. Most servicers charge a few hundred dollars for it. It is badly underused and it is often the better answer than a refinance. And free help exists. HUD approved housing counselors will run this analysis with you at no cost and they are not selling you a loan. The line is 800-569-4287. I am a real estate professional, not a lender, so confirm the numbers with your servicer directly. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I work with homeowners across Los Angeles and the South Bay, including people weighing whether to keep a home or sell it. If it does come to selling, do it from a position of choice rather than after a default. Your equity is worth far more that way. Zoltan

Edward, The illness is not the issue. The missing coverage is. Every brokerage in the country has agents who get sick, and the professional answer is a backup, not a pause. A week of rescheduled showings on a fresh listing costs real money, because a listing draws its heaviest traffic in the first two to three weeks and showing volume falls off after that regardless of price. Here is what I would do today, in order. Call the broker of record or the office manager, not your agent. Ask for interim coverage in writing. Who is fielding showing requests, who is opening the door, who is calling buyer agents back. That is the brokerage's obligation under your listing agreement. Framing it as a request for service continuity rather than a complaint about your agent gets a much better result. While you have them, ask for three specific numbers. - How many showing requests came in during the week, and how many were declined or rescheduled - Whether each of those buyer agents was followed up with afterward, and what they said - Your listing's online view count and saves, week over week That third number tells you whether you actually lost buyers or just lost a week. It matters for what you do next. Then ask for a lockbox and a showing scheduling service. If the property is vacant or you can step out, a lockbox plus a showing service takes your agent off the critical path entirely. Buyer agents book without needing a human to answer the phone. Honestly, this should have been set up on day one. On whether you can leave. Read your listing agreement. Most have a cancellation provision and most brokerages will release an unhappy seller rather than fight, particularly when the service failure is documented in email. But I would not lead with that. Lead with the coverage request. If they cannot produce a covering agent by tomorrow, you have your answer and you have it in writing. Last thing, and it is the one sellers skip. Do not just resume. Ask for a relaunch plan: a price check against everything that closed and went pending during the gap, fresh photos if the season or the yard changed, and direct outreach to every agent who showed it or asked about it. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay. A week is recoverable. Drifting for another two is not. Zoltan

Edward, the thing you are losing right now is not showings, it is days on market, and that is why this cannot wait politely for him to recover. Your listing is active. The counter runs every day whether or not anyone can get inside. Buyers and their agents read a rising day count as a signal that something is wrong with the house or the price, and by the time your agent is back on his feet you may be carrying a number that invites lowball offers on a property that was never actually given a fair run. That is a real and lasting cost, and it is separate from the frustration of rescheduling. So there are two conversations to have, and the first one is not with your agent. It is with his manager. Call the office and ask for the managing agent. Say your listing is active, showings are being rescheduled, and you need coverage assigned today. Every company can do this. Another licensee in the same firm can be given lockbox and showing access, can handle showing requests, and can cover your open house. This is ordinary, it is what a company is for, and you should not be the one arranging it. You are asking for coverage, not complaining about a sick person, and framing it that way tends to get a fast yes. Then, second, ask about protecting the day count. Ask your agent or the manager whether a short temporary withdrawal or hold status makes sense until showings can run properly, and specifically how your MLS treats the day counter during and after that status. This varies quite a bit by market. In some MLSs a hold pauses it, in some the count continues, and some require a minimum period off market before a relist starts fresh. Do not guess and do not let anyone else guess either. Get the actual local rule before you choose, because doing this wrong can cost you the very thing you are trying to protect. Weigh it honestly. If he will be back in a few days and coverage is in place, staying active is probably right and a brief gap will not hurt you. If this is going to run two or three weeks, sitting active and unshowable is the worst of the options. A few practical things while you sort it out. Make sure showing requests are actually reaching someone. The most common failure is not refusal, it is that requests are going into the voicemail of a person who is asleep. Confirm who is on the other end today. Ask that inquiries from the past week be called back. Buyer interest decays fast, and some of those agents have already shown their clients something else. A recovery call is worth making. Keep your own record. Note the dates showings were requested and what happened. Not to build a case, just so you are working from facts rather than an impression if you do need to have a harder conversation later. And on the harder conversation, since I suspect you are wondering. I would not move to cancel over an illness, and most listing agreements are with the company anyway, so cancellation is not really the tool here. Coverage is. If the company will not provide coverage after you have clearly asked the manager for it, that is a different problem and a fair reason to reconsider the relationship. But ask first. Most of the time this is a gap nobody thought to fill rather than a firm refusing to help. I am a real estate professional and not an attorney, and your listing agreement governs the specifics, so read what you signed or have someone read it with you. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay, where I keep a standing arrangement for exactly this so a seller's listing never goes dark. If you are in this area I am glad to talk it through. Elsewhere, tell me where you are and I will connect you with a strong agent in my network. Zoltan

Beth, You are allowed to change agents over this. You do not need a noble reason and you do not owe anyone a speech. This is a person you will spend twenty hours in a car with while making the largest purchase of your life. Compatibility is a legitimate business criterion, full stop. Two paths. I would try them in this order. Path one, if you otherwise like his work. Say something. I know how that lands. But you said you liked his responses and his approach, and that is the genuinely hard part to find. One short, private, non-cruel sentence, over the phone rather than face to face, gives him a chance to fix something he may honestly not know about. Something close to: I want to keep working with you and I want to be direct about something awkward. There is a body odor issue in the car and it is getting in the way for me. Some people handle that with grace, and if he does, you get to keep a good agent. Path two, and this is completely reasonable if you would rather not have that conversation at all. Call the broker of record or the office manager at his brokerage. Not the agent. Say you would like to be reassigned within the office. You do not have to give a reason and any decent manager will not press you for one. Reassignment inside a brokerage is routine and it does not disturb your buyer agreement. If you would rather leave the company entirely, ask the broker for a written release from your buyer representation agreement, and ask specifically that they waive the protection period or name the exact properties it covers. That is the clause that says if you buy something he showed you within a certain window after you leave, compensation is still owed. Handle it on the way out and it never becomes an argument later. One thing worth holding in mind. If this is not hygiene but a medical or mental health issue, and sometimes it is, going through the broker rather than confronting the agent is both the kinder route and the safer one for you. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay. Managers field this request more often than you would guess. Do not feel bad about making it. Zoltan

Marion, Let me give you the honest version, because I think the search itself is the problem more than the agents are. Two separate things are happening here. On the HUD side. HUD homes are former FHA financed properties that went through foreclosure, and they are listed publicly at hudhomestore.com. Anyone can browse it for free, you do not need special access to see them. What you cannot do is bid directly. Bids have to be submitted by a broker registered with HUD who holds a NAID, a Name Address Identifier. So the question to ask any agent is simply: are you HUD registered, do you have a NAID number. It is a yes or no question and it will save you weeks. There is also the Good Neighbor Next Door program, a 50 percent discount on select HUD homes, but only for teachers, law enforcement, firefighters and EMTs buying in specific revitalization areas, so it likely does not apply to you. Now the harder part. You described a four bedroom, four bathroom two story on enough acreage for four or five horses with an attached three car garage, needing work, outside Littleton. HUD inventory comes from FHA loans, which are owner occupant loans with loan limits, and FHA does not typically finance large acreage equestrian property. The odds of that exact property appearing in HUD's inventory in Jefferson or Douglas County are very low. You could watch for years and never see it. If the real goal is a fixer horse property at a good price, these are the tools that actually fit. - FHA 203(k) or Fannie Mae HomeStyle renovation financing. These roll the purchase and the remodel into one loan. This is the correct tool for needs work, and far more available than HUD inventory. - USDA financing, which does allow acreage and requires no down payment for qualified buyers. Eligibility is address by address, so check the specific property on the USDA eligibility map rather than assuming. - Estate sales, probate and expired listings. That is where genuinely underpriced rural property actually trades, and it is agent legwork rather than a website. So I would stop looking for a HUD specialist and start looking for a Colorado agent who does land and equestrian property in the south Denver metro. Separately, call a lender about 203(k) or HomeStyle. And before you fall in love with anything, confirm water rights and the zoning limit on number of horses, because in Colorado those two items decide the deal more often than the house does. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, so Littleton is not my backyard. If it would help, I will connect you with a land and equestrian agent in the Denver metro from my referral network. Zoltan

Marion, I want to save you a year, so I am going to answer a slightly different question than the one you asked. What you described is a two-story home on acreage zoned for four or five horses, at least four bedrooms and four bathrooms, an attached three car garage, and needing remodeling, in the outskirts of Littleton. HUD's inventory is overwhelmingly modest suburban single-family homes and small condominiums. Horse property on acreage with a 3 car garage almost never enters that pipeline, and when something like it does, it is gone in days. If you build your search around HUD, you will spend a year checking a channel that structurally does not carry what you want. The good news is that the two things you actually want, a fixer and favorable financing, are available without HUD at all. On the financing, the FHA 203(k) that others in the thread mentioned is exactly built for your situation. It finances the purchase and the renovation in a single loan, based on the value after improvements, so you are not trying to find cash for a remodel after closing. That works on ordinary listings. It is not a HUD-inventory program. Getting pre-approved for a 203(k) with a lender who actually closes them, and there are far fewer of those than lenders who say they do, is worth more to you than any amount of HUD searching. Ask any lender how many 203(k) loans they closed last year. If the answer is vague, move on. On finding the house, you want an agent who works equestrian property in Douglas, Jefferson and Elbert counties, because that is where the acreage around Littleton sits and the zoning and water questions there are specialized. Horse property involves things a general residential agent will not check: how many animals the zoning and the parcel size actually permit, whether there is a well and what the well permit allows, whether irrigation or ditch rights come with it, septic capacity and condition, fencing, and access for a trailer. Those questions decide whether a property works for you, and none of them appear in the listing. Now, if you still want to be able to bid on HUD homes when one does appear, here is the accurate process. You cannot bid yourself. Bids must be submitted by a real estate professional registered with HUD who holds an active NAID number. Not every agent has one. To find one, use the agent search tool on HUDHomeStore and search by city or ZIP for Littleton and the surrounding towns. That gives you the registered list directly rather than guessing. Understand the bidding windows, because this is the part that decides whether you are competing with investors. On FHA-insured properties there is an initial exclusive period of roughly 30 days when only owner-occupants, nonprofits and government agencies may bid. On uninsured properties that exclusive window can be much shorter, commonly five to fifteen days. Since you intend to live there, you have a real advantage during those windows and no advantage after them. So the practical requirement is to see new listings the day they post, which means your agent sets up the alert, not you. And know that these are sold as-is with no repairs and generally no negotiation on condition after the fact. For a house you already want to remodel, that is less of a problem than usual, but pair it with a 203(k) and a thorough inspection so the remodel scope is priced before you commit rather than discovered after. My honest recommendation. Do both, weighted properly. Get 203(k) pre-approved this month, hire an equestrian-property agent in the Littleton area and search the open market seriously, and have that agent be HUD-registered so that if something suitable does surface you can move in the owner-occupant window. Do not wait on HUD as the plan. I am a real estate professional and not a lender, so get the 203(k) numbers from a lender who closes them regularly. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay, so Colorado is outside my market and I will not guess at Littleton acreage values. Tell me and I will connect you with an agent in my network who actually does horse property along the Front Range, which is a genuine specialty and not something every agent can do. Zoltan

Laura, Here is the piece that trips almost everyone up, and it is exactly why your search has been frustrating. The first time buyer grants and assistance programs are not lender products. They are administered by your state housing finance agency, and sometimes by your county or city. A lender cannot offer you one unless that agency has approved and trained them to deliver it. So flip the direction of the search. 1. Find your state housing finance agency and go to their first time buyer or down payment assistance page. They publish the actual current programs with income limits, purchase price limits and credit score minimums. 2. On the same site, find their participating lender list. That list is the answer to your question. Those are the only lenders authorized to originate that assistance. Call three of them, not one. 3. Call a HUD approved housing counseling agency. Counseling is free or very low cost, they are not selling you a loan, and most assistance programs require a homebuyer education certificate anyway so you will need them regardless. Find one at hud.gov or call the HUD housing counseling line at 800-569-4287. Two things I have learned the hard way. Anything that asks you to pay an upfront fee to apply for a grant is not a government program. Real assistance programs do not charge consumers an application fee to apply. If someone wants money up front to get you a grant, walk. The programs move. Funds run out, get reallocated, and come back. If your state agency says a program is closed, ask when the next allocation is expected and get on the notification list. I have had clients funded on a program that had been out of money six weeks earlier. And know what you are actually receiving. Most assistance is a second lien, not a gift. Some are forgiven after five or ten years of occupancy, some are repaid when you sell or refinance. Ask which one you are getting, in writing, before you commit to anything. One note since you asked this in late 2025: program terms and income limits get updated at least annually, so confirm the current numbers directly with the agency rather than relying on any article, including this one. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, and first time buyers are a large part of my business. Tell me what state you are in and I will point you at the right agency, and connect you with an agent in my network there if you need one. Zoltan

Ben, My advice: greet them, hand them a one page packet, offer to answer questions, then stay out of the way. Do not do the guided tour. The reason is not etiquette, it is how the assignment works. The appraiser is engaged by your lender, not by you. Their obligation runs to the lender, and they work under USPAP, which requires an independent and impartial opinion. An appraiser who feels a seller is steering them tends to get more conservative, not less. Hovering reads as pressure even when you do not mean it that way. But this is not a showing either. Do not leave the house. Be there, in one room, available. You are the only person alive who can answer when the roof was done and whether that addition was permitted. The packet is where your actual leverage sits. One page, printed, handed over at the door. - Every improvement with year and approximate cost - Permit numbers or copies for any permitted work, especially additions, garage conversions and ADUs - Three or four comparable sales you and your agent believe are the right ones, with one line each on why (same school attendance area, similar lot, similar condition) - Anything invisible from inside: new sewer lateral, foundation work, new electrical panel, whether solar is owned or leased There is a real line here and it is worth understanding. Appraisers are permitted to receive factual information and comparable sales from interested parties. They are not permitted to receive a predetermined value or a number you need them to hit. Give them data, never a target. A good agent knows exactly where that line is and should either attend the appraisal or send the comp packet to the appraiser in advance. If it comes back low, you are not stuck. Ask your lender about a reconsideration of value. It works when you can point to a factual error or a better comparable the appraiser did not use. It does not work when you simply disagree with the number. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay. Happy to walk you through building the packet if you are anywhere in my area. Zoltan

Sam, Short answer: a spotless house will not raise your appraised value and toys on the floor will not lower it. Do not deep clean for the appraiser. You have small kids. Give yourself the break. Here is what is actually happening. On lender work, the appraiser scores your property on a standardized condition rating from C1 to C6 under the Uniform Appraisal Dataset. C1 is essentially new construction. C6 means substantial deferred maintenance affecting safety or soundness. Clutter does not move you between those ratings. Worn flooring, a roof at the end of its life, peeling paint, cracked windows, a furnace that does not fire, missing handrails, those move you. So put your energy here instead. Make sure everything works. Every fixture has a working bulb, every faucet runs, the heat and the air conditioning both turn on, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors are installed and functioning. Appraisers do flag health and safety items, and on FHA and VA loans those items can require repair before the loan will close. That is the one place a small thing genuinely costs you. Clear the access points. The appraiser needs to reach the attic hatch, the electrical panel, the water heater and the crawlspace. If the kids' gear is stacked in front of the panel, move it. An appraiser who cannot inspect something has to note that, and notes cost you. Have a list ready. One page. Every improvement with the year and rough cost. New roof 2022. Kitchen 2023. HVAC 2024. Include permit numbers if you have them. Hand it over at the door. This is the single most useful thing a seller can do for an appraisal and almost nobody does it. Tidy is plenty. Vacuum, open the blinds, take the trash out, put the dog somewhere. Then go about your day. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay. If you are anywhere from Palos Verdes to Torrance to Redondo Beach and you want help putting that improvement list together before your appraisal, I am happy to do it with you. Zoltan

A gift is one of the most common ways buyers get to the closing table, and the key is doing it the way underwriters expect so it does not blow up your loan. Here is the playbook. - Who can give it. For most loans the donor needs to be a family member or another documented close relationship. It cannot come from the seller, the agent, or anyone who benefits from the sale. - How much. On a primary residence, conventional and FHA loans both allow the entire down payment to come from a gift. So a gift can cover 100% of your down in most cases. - The gift letter. Your lender will require a signed letter stating the amount, that it is a true gift with no repayment expected, and the donor's relationship to you. This is non-negotiable, so plan on it. - The paper trail is everything. Underwriters want to see the money move: the donor's withdrawal and your deposit, ideally matching. The cleanest path is a single wire or check with a clear record. Money that has been sitting in your account for a while ("seasoned," roughly 60 days) draws fewer questions; money that lands the week before closing gets scrutinized, so get it in early. On taxes, do not panic about the number. For 2026 a person can give up to $19,000 to another person ($38,000 from a married couple) with no filing at all. Larger gifts just require the donor to file a gift-tax form and reduce their lifetime exemption; actual gift tax is rarely owed. That is the donor's issue, not the buyer's, and worth a quick call to a tax advisor. I am a real estate professional, not a lender or CPA, so confirm the specifics with your loan officer, but if you set the gift up this way it should sail through. I am based in Los Angeles, in the South Bay. If you are buying near here I am glad to connect you with lenders who handle gift-funded purchases all the time, and if you are elsewhere I can refer a strong local agent from my network. Zoltan

Yes, in most cases a family member can help pay for a buydown, but the answer depends on which kind of buydown you mean, so let me separate them because they behave very differently. - Permanent buydown (discount points). You pay points up front to lower your interest rate for the life of the loan. A family member can gift the money for this the same way they can gift a down payment, with a gift letter and a clean paper trail. This is the one that keeps saving you money for 30 years. - Temporary buydown (like a 2-1). Money goes into a lender-held escrow that subsidizes your rate for the first year or two, then it steps up to the full note rate. It lowers your payment early on, which helps if you expect income to rise. A family member can often fund this too, again as a documented gift. The one rule to keep straight: who pays matters. When a family member gifts the funds, it is treated as a gift and generally fine. When the seller, builder, or agent pays for the buydown, it counts as an interested-party contribution and is capped by your loan type (roughly 3 to 9% on conventional depending on your down payment, 6% on FHA, 4% on VA). So a gift from Mom is treated differently from a credit from the seller, even if the dollar amount is the same. Two practical tips: tell your loan officer up front that a relative is funding the buydown so they document it correctly from day one, and before you spend money on a temporary buydown, ask whether permanent points or simply a larger down payment would serve you better over the time you plan to keep the loan. I am a real estate professional, not a lender, so confirm the mechanics with your loan officer. I am based in Los Angeles, in the South Bay. If you are buying near here I am glad to connect you with lenders who structure these all the time, and if you are elsewhere I can refer a strong local agent from my network. Zoltan

Buying sight unseen works. I have closed transactions for clients who never set foot in the property before signing. What makes it work is not the video tour, it is the contract. Build these into your offer. - A full inspection contingency with the right to cancel and get your deposit back, not just the right to request repairs. That is your real safety net. - An appraisal contingency. If you are wrong about value from 1,500 miles away, the appraisal is your independent check on the number. - More time than a local buyer would ask for. You are coordinating from Arizona. Rushing is how sight unseen purchases go wrong. On the tour, insist on a live video call rather than a recorded walkthrough. Recorded tours are edited. On a live call you can say point the camera at that ceiling corner, open that closet, run the shower. Have your agent walk the property line, walk the street in both directions, and stand outside at the hour you would normally come home. Then hire your own inspector, chosen by you, not handed to you. Ask about a sewer scope as a separate line item, because it is one of the few five figure surprises a standard inspection will not catch. Ask specifically for the age of the roof, furnace, air conditioner and water heater, and whether the property is on municipal water and sewer or on a well and septic system, because that varies by subdivision in the outer suburbs and it changes your maintenance budget considerably. Have your agent pull the actual permit history from the village so you know whether that finished basement or three season room was permitted. One more thing people skip. If you can possibly manage it, fly out once before you remove contingencies. Not to see the house. To see the town. Photos never tell you about traffic noise, the real commute, or how a neighborhood feels on a Saturday morning. Since you asked back in the fall and you were targeting the following spring, one note for a 2026 reader: rates and inventory have moved since then, so redo the affordability math with a current pre-approval before you write. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, so northern Illinois is not my market. Relocation buyers are a big part of what I do, though. Tell me your timeline and I will connect you with a relocation experienced agent in the northwest suburbs from my referral network. Zoltan

Drew, Short answer: yes, you can almost always get out of a buyer representation agreement, and your situation has an unusually clean argument for it. You signed expecting one agent and the company substituted a different one. That is a change to what you agreed to. Three things to know. The agreement is with the brokerage, not the individual agent. That cuts both ways. It is why they could reassign you, and it is also why the broker is the only person with authority to release you. Do not negotiate this with the agent you want to leave. Email the broker of record or the office manager directly and put your request in writing. Ask for a written release. Every buyer agreement I have seen has a termination provision, and most brokerages will sign a mutual release rather than drag an unhappy buyer through the full term. In California the standard form is the C.A.R. Buyer Representation and Broker Compensation Agreement, the BRBC, and it contemplates early termination. Whatever form your state uses, get the release signed and keep a copy. Watch the protection period. This is the part people miss. Most agreements say that if you buy a home that agent showed you or introduced you to within a set window after termination, compensation is still owed. That is where a procuring cause dispute comes from months later. In your release, either get the protection period waived outright or list the specific addresses it covers. Either one protects you. A vague release does not. One practical note for the next company. Since August 2024 buyers nationwide have to sign a written representation agreement before touring homes, so you will be signing one again. Before you do, ask them to write in a short initial term, 30 to 90 days is reasonable, and a plain language cancellation clause. A good agent will not blink at that. If they push back hard on a short term, that tells you something useful. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney, so if the brokerage refuses to release you, an hour with a real estate attorney in your state is money well spent. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I work with buyers and sellers across Los Angeles and the South Bay, including Palos Verdes, Torrance, Redondo Beach and San Pedro. If you are in my area I am glad to talk this through directly. If you are not, tell me where you are looking and I will connect you with someone in my network who will start you off with a fair agreement. Zoltan

Great question, Devon, and a smart one to ask before you are in the middle of it. The folks above did a solid job on the basic definition, so let me not repeat all of that. Instead let me tighten up the definition, then hit the two parts that trip people up, plus a few California specifics nobody here has mentioned. Quick definition: a right of first refusal (ROFR) means that if and when the owner decides to sell and gets a real offer, the holder gets the first shot to buy on those same terms before the owner can sell to that outside buyer. Two things it is NOT. It is not an option to buy at a set price whenever you feel like it, and it does not force the owner to ever sell. It only wakes up when the owner chooses to sell. On your lease question, yes, a ROFR written into a lease gives the tenant that first crack, but only once the landlord decides to sell. A couple of California specifics that matter and that the answers above skipped: - Record it. In California, to make sure the right actually binds a future buyer, you generally record a short memorandum of the ROFR with the county recorder. If it is only sitting in the lease and never recorded, a good-faith buyer who did not know about it can sometimes take the property free of it. - Watch the wording. California courts look hard at rights that could tie up a property's sale forever or that lock in a fixed price, because those act as a restraint on selling. A clean ROFR that simply lets the holder match a genuine market offer, with a clear response deadline, is usually fine. An open-ended or fixed-price one can be challenged. So the exact language is everything. Now the inheritance part, which is really two different questions rolled together, and this is where I see the most confusion: - Who owns it when the owner dies is decided by the estate, not by the ROFR. The property passes through the owner's will or trust, or if there is neither, through California's intestate succession rules (usually the spouse and children). A tenant's right of first refusal does not let the tenant jump ahead of the children to inherit. The kids inherit. - Does the tenant get to buy when the owner dies? Usually no. Passing a home to heirs is generally not a "sale," so it does not trigger the ROFR, and many well-drafted ROFRs specifically exclude transfers to family or by inheritance. So the owner passing away and the children inheriting, by itself, does not give the tenant a right to buy. - What if the children later sell? Then a valid, still-effective ROFR typically travels with the property, and the heirs have to honor it, meaning they give the tenant the chance to match an outside offer before selling. If the children keep it and never sell, the ROFR never comes into play. - One California heads-up if the kids inherit and keep it: look at your property taxes under Prop 19 before doing anything, because a parent-to-child transfer can trigger a reassessment to current market value unless it qualifies for the limited exclusion. Worth a quick call to a CPA. Bottom line, the ROFR and the inheritance are two separate tracks. Inheritance decides who gets the house. The ROFR only gives someone a chance to buy if and when an owner, original or heir, decides to sell. Quick disclaimer: I am a California Realtor, not an attorney, and this stuff lives and dies on the exact wording of the lease and the estate documents. If you are actually in this situation, have a California real estate or estate attorney read the specific clause and the will or trust before anyone assumes what their rights are. I am a Realtor down in the L.A./South Bay area, so I will not pretend to know the Sacramento market block by block, but I would be glad to connect you with a strong Sacramento agent and a good real estate attorney from my network who can look at the actual paperwork. Happy to take follow-ups right here too. Zoltan

June, the 45 day rate shopping window everyone quotes is only true on newer FICO versions. Older FICO versions and VantageScore 3.0 use 14 days. Since you do not get to choose which model your lender pulls, do all your shopping inside 14 days and you are protected under every version. That is the one piece of precision that matters, because the general advice in this thread will still cost you if you spread your applications over a month. Here is the rest, briefly, since others have covered it. Yes, refinancing causes a small temporary dip. Two things drive it: the hard inquiry, and the new account replacing an older one, which shortens your average account age. Hard inquiries stay on your report for two years but only factor into FICO scoring for twelve months, and their weight fades well before that. The paid-off original mortgage keeps reporting as a closed account in good standing and keeps counting toward your history. Now the part that matters more for you specifically, since you said you are working hard to build your credit. The dip from a refinance is small and temporary. What actually moves a score meaningfully is your credit utilization on revolving accounts, and that is entirely under your control. If you have credit card balances, paying them down before you apply will typically do more for your score than avoiding the refinance does. Utilization has no memory, so it improves the month after you pay, unlike history which takes years. Two practical rules for the refinance itself. Do not open anything else during the process. No car, no store card, no furniture financing, not even a zero percent offer at checkout. Lenders re-pull credit shortly before closing, and a new account discovered at that point can change your terms or delay the file. This is the most common self-inflicted wound in a refinance. Keep making the current mortgage payment until you have written confirmation the old loan is paid off. Payoffs and the final payment sometimes overlap, and a single missed mortgage payment does far more damage than every inquiry combined. And a reframe on your bigger goal. You mentioned a high rate mortgage. A lower payment frees cash flow, and cash flow is what lets you pay down revolving debt, which is the thing genuinely holding your score down. So a refinance can be a small short-term cost and a large medium-term gain, if you put the savings toward balances rather than absorbing them into spending. That is the sequence I would aim for. I am a real estate professional, not a lender or a credit counselor, so let a loan officer run your actual file. If your credit is the constraint, free HUD-approved housing counseling is genuinely useful and costs nothing. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay. If you are in this area I am glad to introduce you to lenders who will look at the whole picture rather than just the score. Elsewhere, tell me where you are and I will connect you through my network. Zoltan

Ivan, there is a cost to serial refinancing that never shows up in a break-even calculation, and it is usually the biggest one: every refinance into a fresh 30 year term restarts the amortization clock, and the early years of a mortgage are almost entirely interest. Work through it. Say you are five years into a 30 year loan. You have made sixty payments, and a meaningful share of your balance is finally going to principal each month. Refinance into a new 30 year loan and you are back at year one, where the payment is overwhelmingly interest again. Your monthly payment drops, which feels like a win, and your total interest paid over the life of the debt can go up even though your rate went down. The fix is simple and almost nobody asks for it: request a term that matches what you have left. Five years in, ask for a 25 year term, not a 30. Ten years in, ask for 20. Lenders quote these routinely, the payment relief is smaller, and you keep the progress you made. Ask for both quotes side by side and compare total interest, not just payment. The thread has covered frequency limits and break-even well, so I will not repeat those. Two things to add on your actual dilemma of "now or wait." First, nobody knows where rates go. Anyone who tells you confidently is guessing. What you can do is stop trying to time the bottom and set a rule instead. Pick the rate at which refinancing makes sense for you, tell a loan officer that number, and ask them to call you if it is reached. Most will happily set that alert. You get the benefit of a lower rate if it comes without spending the next year checking rate websites. Second, on refinancing twice: yes, you can. There is no legal limit and there is no penalty for doing it more than once, beyond the closing costs each time. But run the numbers honestly. If you refinance now and again in a year, you pay closing costs twice, and each set has to be recovered. Whether that beats waiting depends entirely on how much you save in the interim and on whether the second drop actually arrives. Rolling costs into the balance makes it feel free and it is not, since you now pay interest on those costs for decades. Practical suggestion for your specific situation. Get a full quote today with no obligation, including a lender credit option where the lender covers closing costs in exchange for a slightly higher rate. That structure changes the calculation completely, because with no out of pocket cost there is nothing to recover, and refinancing again later costs you nothing but paperwork. That is the version of "refi now and refi again" that actually works. Ask specifically for it. Not every loan officer will offer it unprompted, partly because it pays them less. One last note. If you have a VA loan, the interest rate reduction refinance, the IRRRL, is a streamlined product with far less documentation and lower cost, which changes the math meaningfully. Worth asking about if it applies. I am a real estate professional and not a lender, so get actual numbers from two or three loan officers rather than relying on general guidance, including mine. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay. If you are anywhere near the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Torrance, Redondo Beach or San Pedro I am glad to introduce you to lenders who will quote the shorter term and the lender credit option without being pushed. Elsewhere, tell me where and I will connect you through my network. Zoltan

Patricia, before you price it, find out whether it will perc, because a rural parcel that passes a soil evaluation is worth a different order of magnitude than one that does not, and in Delta soils that is a real question rather than a formality. Here is why this comes first. With no public sewer, a buyer who wants to build needs an approved on-site wastewater system, and approval starts with a soil evaluation or percolation test through the county health department. A 1.9 acre parcel on a highway that will support a septic system is a homesite. The same parcel that will not is recreational or agricultural land, and it sells to a different buyer at a different price. You cannot price the property until you know which one you own, and every serious buyer will ask. Call the Yazoo County health department and ask what the process is and what it costs. It is usually a few hundred dollars. Paying for it before you list, and having the result in hand, is one of the highest-return things a rural land seller can do, in either direction: a pass is a selling point you can advertise, and a fail is something you need to know before you set a price you cannot get. While you are making calls, check two more things that move value on small rural acreage: Utilities at the road. Electric, and whether there is a rural water association line you can tap. A parcel with power and water at the frontage is worth considerably more than one requiring a long service run or a well. Zoning and any deed restrictions. Ask the county what is permitted. Some rural parcels carry restrictions from the original split that limit use, and a buyer's attorney will find them. Now on price. The thread has covered comparable sales, so the practical point I will add: comparable sales for small rural acreage are thin, and the two shortcuts people reach for are both wrong. Your county tax assessment is not market value. Assessors work on mass appraisal schedules and are often well off, in either direction, on rural land. And online estimates are essentially meaningless on vacant land, because the models are built for houses with square footage and bedroom counts. Two ways to get a real number. The cheap way: ask two or three agents who actually sell land in Yazoo County, not residential agents in Jackson, for a written opinion of value with the comparable sales attached. Ask each to show you actual closed sales of parcels between roughly one and five acres in the county in the last eighteen months, with road frontage noted. If they cannot produce the sales, their number is a guess. The defensible way: hire a certified appraiser who does land work and have them prepare a land appraisal under USPAP. It costs several hundred dollars. It is worth it if you have a specific reason to need a defensible number, such as an estate, a partition among family members, or a buyer who is financing. One last thought. Highway 16 frontage cuts both ways. It is access and visibility, which some buyers pay for, and it is road noise, which residential buyers discount. If the parcel could support a small commercial or contractor use under the county's rules, that frontage may be worth more to that buyer than to a homesite buyer, and it is worth asking the county whether the zoning allows it. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, so Mississippi is well outside my market and I will not guess at a per-acre number for Yazoo County. Tell me and I will connect you with an agent in my network who actually sells rural land there, which is a genuinely different specialty from selling houses. Zoltan

Deborah, two tax bills does not mean you are being taxed twice. Each parcel is assessed on its own value and billed separately, so the two bills added together should be roughly what one bill on the combined land would be. Before you do anything, add them up. Most people asking this question discover the total is what they expected, and the problem was the paperwork, not the money. Second thing, and this is the part that explains your situation: your deed describing them together did not merge them. A deed transfers ownership. Merger is a separate land use action processed by your county planning department or assessor. You can own two parcels under one deed forever and they remain two parcels. That is normal, not an error. So which is cheaper. Usually there is no meaningful difference, and where there is one it can run either way. Where two parcels can cost more: some jurisdictions apply a minimum or flat charge per parcel for services like fire district fees, mosquito abatement or lighting districts. Two parcels means two of those charges, and they are usually modest. Some jurisdictions also assess vacant land at its highest and best use rather than its current use, so a separately assessed buildable lot can carry a higher per-acre assessment than the same acreage would as part of your yard. Where two parcels can cost less: if one parcel qualifies for an exemption or a use classification and the other does not, keeping them separate preserves the favorable treatment on the qualifying one. Agricultural, timber and homestead classifications work this way in many states. Merging can lose you that. But here is the thing I would actually urge on you, and it is the opposite of what most people conclude. Do not merge them to save a small amount of money. Merger is a one-way door. Splitting them again later means a new subdivision or parcel map application, which is discretionary, expensive and sometimes simply denied under current zoning even though the parcels existed historically. Two separate legal parcels are an asset. You can sell one and keep the other. You can build on one. You can give one to a family member. You can borrow against one without encumbering the other. That optionality is worth far more than a per-parcel service fee. What I would do this week, in order. Call your county assessor. Give them both APNs and ask three questions: what is each parcel assessed at, are there any per-parcel flat fees on either bill, and is either parcel classified differently from the other. They answer this all day and it costs nothing. While you have them, ask whether either parcel is currently buildable under present zoning. If the answer is yes for the vacant one, do not merge under any circumstances. A separately buildable lot in a developed area is often worth substantially more than the same land absorbed into a neighboring yard, and buyers and builders pay for that specifically. Then, if you still want them combined, ask for the combination process in writing and what it costs. Knowing the price of the door before you walk through it is fair. I am a real estate professional and not a tax adviser or a land use attorney, and merger procedure and assessment practice vary a great deal by state and county, so let your assessor confirm the specifics. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay, where this exact question comes up constantly on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If you are elsewhere, tell me where and I will connect you with a strong agent in my network who knows the local rules. Zoltan

Melissa, here is the number that reframes this whole idea: in Georgia, the former owner has twelve months to redeem, and to do it they pay you your purchase price plus a 20 percent premium in the first year, plus another 10 percent for each year after that. And you cannot get title insurance until you bar that right, which requires advertising in the official county newspaper once a week for four weeks. So the realistic outcome of a Georgia tax sale is not a house. It is either a 20 percent return when someone redeems, or roughly eighteen months of process before you can safely occupy or resell. The thread has covered the general difference between tax liens and tax deeds, so let me give you the actual timeline for your three states, because they are not the same and it matters that you are shopping across state lines. Georgia. Tax deed state. You bid at auction, you get a deed, but the deed is subject to redemption for twelve months. After that you must foreclose the right of redemption, which is the barment process, with four weeks of published notice. Only then does the redemption right end. There is a second path, ripening by prescription, where a properly executed tax deed ripens four years after recordation under O.C.G.A. section 48-4-48, but four years of holding a property you cannot insure or sell is not a plan. Barment plus a quiet title action is the normal route, and it involves an attorney. Tennessee and North Carolina. Both have their own systems and their own redemption timelines, and they are different from Georgia's and from each other's. Do not carry Georgia's rules across the line. Check each county's delinquent tax office directly. Now the honest picture of what you would actually be buying. Most properties at these sales are not simple homes waiting for someone to pay the taxes. If a home has genuine equity, the owner or a lienholder almost always redeems, because redeeming is cheaper than losing the house. What tends to go all the way through are properties with problems: severe deferred maintenance, environmental issues, access problems, unmarketable title, or land nobody can build on. That is not always true, but it is true often enough that you should assume it and be pleasantly surprised. You cannot inspect them. You bid without going inside. Occupants may still be living there. You need cash. Most sales require payment same day or within a very short window, and no lender will finance a tax sale purchase. And other liens may survive. Some are extinguished, some are not, and federal tax liens in particular have their own rules. One thing worth knowing that is genuinely in your favor: excess proceeds. When a property sells at tax sale for more than the taxes owed, the surplus belongs to the former owner and other claimants, not to the county and not to you. If you are researching this space, that is a legitimate area with real activity and less capital required, and it is worth understanding alongside the auctions themselves. If your actual goal is an affordable home to live in, and reading your question I think it may be, I would spend the same energy differently. Look at USDA Rural Development financing, which covers much of north Georgia, east Tennessee and the Murphy area, offers no down payment for qualified buyers in eligible rural areas, and has income limits that many buyers meet. That path gets you a house you can inspect, insure and finance, this year, without eighteen months and an attorney. Tell me if that is the real goal and I will point you at it. I am a real estate professional and not an attorney, and tax sale purchasing is genuinely a legal specialty. If you pursue it, hire a real estate attorney in the specific state before your first bid, not after. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay, so I do not work these markets. Tell me which of the three you are most serious about and I will connect you with a strong agent in my network there. Zoltan

Mark, no sales tax in Florida on a home purchase, and the thread has doc stamps well covered. Here is the Florida-specific item worth far more money that nobody mentioned: if you already own a homesteaded Florida home, portability lets you carry your accumulated Save Our Homes benefit to the new one. Why this matters more than doc stamps. Florida's Save Our Homes provision caps how much the assessed value of a homesteaded property can rise each year. Over a long ownership, that gap between market value and assessed value becomes large, and it is the single biggest reason two neighbors in identical houses pay wildly different property taxes. When you sell and buy another Florida homestead, portability lets you transfer that accumulated benefit rather than starting over at full market assessment. There are limits on how much can transfer and there is a filing deadline, and it does not happen automatically. You have to file for it with the county property appraiser, and people miss it every year. If you currently own a homesteaded Florida property, call your county property appraiser's office before you close on the next one and ask exactly what to file and by when. That call is worth more than everything else in this thread combined. Also file for the homestead exemption itself on the new property. Same office, annual deadline, and it is what starts the Save Our Homes cap running on the new home. On the doc stamp, one detail that has not been stated precisely and that affects your arithmetic: the tax is 70 cents per $100 of consideration in every county except Miami-Dade, where the rate is 60 cents per $100 plus a 45 cent per $100 surtax that applies to transfers other than single family residences. The consideration is rounded up to the nearest $100 before the calculation. And customarily the seller pays it on the deed in Florida, though like everything in a contract it is negotiable, so read who it is assigned to in your purchase agreement rather than assuming. If you are financing, there are two more Florida-specific items on the buyer's side that are easy to miss: documentary stamp tax on the promissory note, and the non-recurring intangible tax on the mortgage. Those are separate from the deed stamps and they are normally the buyer's cost. Your closing agent will itemize both. The clean way to get exact numbers: ask for a Loan Estimate if you are financing, or ask your title company for a written estimated settlement statement if you are paying cash. Either one lists every Florida tax and fee for your specific county and price. I am a real estate professional and not a tax adviser, and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay rather than Florida, so confirm the portability specifics with your county property appraiser. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and if you tell me which Florida county you are buying in I will connect you with a strong agent in my network there who handles the homestead and portability filings with clients routinely. Zoltan

Mark, no state charges sales tax on buying a house. But there is one bill that catches nearly every new owner off guard, and it is not on any of the lists above: the supplemental property tax bill. Here is what happens. In many jurisdictions, including all of California, the county reassesses the property when it changes hands. Your purchase price becomes the new assessed value. The county then issues a separate one-time bill covering the difference between what the previous owner was assessed and what you are now assessed, prorated for the rest of the tax year. Two things make it a problem rather than just an expense. It arrives months after closing, often six months later, when you have stopped thinking about closing costs. And it usually does not come out of your escrow or impound account, because that account was set up based on the seller's old tax amount. It comes straight to you as a bill you have to pay yourself. If you buy from someone who owned the house for a long time and was assessed far below what you paid, that supplemental bill can be substantial. On a $70,000 purchase it will be modest, but the mechanism is worth knowing, and it is worth asking your escrow officer directly: will there be a supplemental assessment, roughly when, and is it included in my impounds. The rest of what you will pay, since the thread has covered these: Transfer or recording taxes at closing, which vary enormously by state, county and sometimes city. In some states the seller customarily pays them. Ask your closing agent for a written estimate. Ongoing property tax, billed by your county, based on assessed value and your local rate. If your lender escrows, roughly one twelfth is collected with each payment. If you pay cash, you pay the county directly and you should set the money aside monthly yourself, because an annual bill is easy to be unprepared for. Recording fees for the deed and the mortgage, which are usually small. One more that is not a tax and matters more than most of them at your price point: insurance. Homeowners insurance has moved sharply in many parts of the country, and on an inexpensive house the annual premium can be a surprisingly large fraction of the total carrying cost. Get an actual quote before you are under contract, not after. On a $70,000 house, the insurance quote can change whether the purchase makes sense. To get real numbers rather than general ones, ask for a Loan Estimate if you are financing. It is a standardized form and it lists every tax and fee for your specific transaction, by state and county. That is the document that answers your question precisely, and you are entitled to it within three business days of applying. I am a real estate professional and not a tax adviser, and transfer taxes and supplemental assessment practice vary by state, so confirm with your closing agent. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay, where supplemental bills under California's Proposition 13 reassessment surprise buyers every single year. If you are elsewhere, tell me the state and I will connect you with a good agent in my network. Zoltan

Mary, the answer turns on one question nobody here has asked you: at your final walk-through, was the power on and did you run the heat and the air conditioning? That single fact is what separates a strong claim from a weak one, and it is the first thing any attorney will ask you. Here is why it decides things. If the utilities were on and the systems ran at the walk-through, and they were dead when you took possession days later, that is a sudden failure and the seller most likely owes you nothing. Equipment fails. It is bad luck, and bad luck is not a breach. If the utilities were off at the walk-through, which is common when a seller has already moved out, then nobody tested anything and the question becomes what the seller knew. A seller who knew the system was dead and did not disclose it has a real problem in almost every state, regardless of "as is." As-is language generally means the seller will not make repairs. It does not generally mean the seller may conceal known defects. If your inspector tested it and reported it working, and it was in fact dead, the inspector may share responsibility, and their report is documentary evidence of the condition on that date. So do these things, in this order, and do them now because time limits matter. Get every document that touches the HVAC: your inspection report and the exact language about the system, the seller's disclosure statement, and your walk-through form if one was signed. Read the disclosure carefully for the age of the system and any repair history. A seller who listed a repair from last year has told you they knew there was a problem. Get a written diagnosis from a licensed HVAC contractor, and ask them one specific question: how long has this unit been non-functional. A good technician can often tell from corrosion, refrigerant loss, rodent damage or a burned-out component whether this happened last week or last year. Get that in writing. It is the single most useful piece of evidence you can produce, and it costs a service call fee. Check whether a home warranty was included in the sale. Someone above raised warranties, and it is worth actually checking your closing documents rather than assuming, because sellers frequently include one and buyers frequently forget. Then decide the fight is worth having. On a $500,000 purchase, $10,000 is two percent. That is real money and it is also less than a contested lawsuit costs. If the technician's report says this failed months ago, a demand letter from a real estate attorney often produces a settlement without litigation, because the seller's exposure for a knowing nondisclosure is worse than the repair cost. If the report says it failed recently, my honest advice is to replace it and move on, because you will spend the $10,000 either way and only one path ends this year. One practical note for anyone reading this later: at your final walk-through, insist that utilities remain on until after closing, and run every system yourself. Heat, air conditioning, every burner, the dishwasher, every faucet, the water heater. It takes twenty minutes and it is the last moment you have leverage. I am a real estate professional and not an attorney, and whether a seller is liable here is a legal question that varies by state and by your contract language. Given the dollar amount, an hour with a real estate attorney in your state is well spent. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay. If you are elsewhere, tell me where and I will connect you with a strong agent in my network who can point you to the right local attorney. Zoltan

Beth, the friction you are picking up on almost always starts at the sign-in sheet, and you can defuse it in about four seconds by writing "neighbor, not currently buying" next to your name. That one line changes the whole interaction, and here is why. That agent's brokerage measures open house performance by leads generated. When you sign in without context, you enter their follow-up system as a prospect. They call, you say you are not buying, and now you are a wasted follow-up on a Tuesday. What you are reading as disappointment in the moment is often just an agent who has not yet figured out which category you are in and is trying to work it out while making conversation. Tell them up front and most of them visibly relax, because you just saved them the call. To your actual question: no, it is not rude, and the thread has covered that thoroughly so I will not pile on. Open houses are public marketing events. Sellers agree to them knowing that not everyone through the door is a buyer, and the alternative, a house that only serious pre-qualified buyers ever see, would defeat the purpose. Three things that make you genuinely welcome rather than merely tolerated. Sign in honestly, as above. And if a sheet asks whether you are working with an agent, answer accurately. Since August 2024, a buyer touring a home with an agent representing them needs a written agreement with that agent first. Attending a public open house does not require one. But if you are ever unclear whether you have crossed from browsing to being shown, ask directly. Offer feedback on your way out. This is the part almost nobody does and it costs you nothing. "The kitchen is beautiful, the traffic noise on this side surprised me" is genuinely valuable to that agent, because the number one thing a listing agent owes their seller after an open house is honest feedback, and most visitors say "very nice" and leave. You know the neighborhood. That makes your feedback better than a stranger's. Say something useful about the neighborhood if it comes up. You are a local. Agents remember the neighbor who told them about the school boundary or the street that floods. That is the person they call in three years when you actually do sell. Which is the last thing worth saying. You are not costing that agent anything. You are their most likely future listing appointment. Neighbors who tour houses are people who think about property values, and they are exactly who lists a home eventually. Any agent who treats you as an inconvenience is misreading their own business. The one time I would skip it: if the listing says appointment only, or if it is clearly a broker-only preview rather than a public open house. Those are not public events. I am a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I hold open houses regularly on the Palos Verdes Peninsula and in Torrance, Redondo Beach and San Pedro. Neighbors are welcome at every single one, and if you are ever in this area, come in. Zoltan

Jennifer, I am sorry about your grandfather. Before anyone can tell you what the property is worth in a way that matters, the estate needs a document that lets the heirs sign a deed, and in Texas that is usually one of two instruments. Which one depends on a question you have not mentioned: did he leave a will? If there is a will, the likely path is probating it as a muniment of title. Texas allows this where there is a valid will and no unpaid debts other than a mortgage. The court issues an order recognizing the will as the conveyance, and title companies accept it. It is far faster and cheaper than a full administration. If there is no will, the usual instrument is an Affidavit of Heirship under the Texas Estates Code, signed by two disinterested witnesses who knew the family and recorded in the county deed records. One important limitation people misunderstand: an affidavit of heirship identifies the heirs, it does not by itself transfer title. Every heir it names still has to sign the deed at closing. With one surviving child and five grandchildren as beneficiaries, that is potentially seven signatures, and Texas intestacy divides per stirpes, meaning the grandchildren split the share their deceased parent would have taken. If any heir will not sign or cannot be located, the fallback is a judicial determination of heirship, which is a court proceeding. That is the real work here, and it is worth starting now, because a title company will not close without one of these. On the value question itself. I am in California, and I am not going to give you a number on a specific parcel in Kaufman County that I have not seen. Anyone who does is guessing. What I can tell you is how to get a defensible one, and for an estate you want it defensible: Order an appraisal dated as of June 25, 2025, your grandfather's date of death. This is called a retrospective appraisal. It costs a few hundred dollars and it does two jobs: it gives the heirs a real number to divide, and it documents the stepped-up cost basis for taxes, which means the heirs likely owe little or no capital gains tax if the property sells near that value. Without it, you are relying on memory years from now. Pull the Kaufman Central Appraisal District record for the parcel. That is a tax figure, not market value, but it tells you acreage, improvements and legal description. Note that the address carries a unit number, which often indicates a manufactured home or one of several units on a tract. That matters a lot, because if there is a manufactured home involved, whether it was ever converted to real property changes both the value and how it transfers. Practical order: find out whether there is a will, call a Kaufman County probate attorney for a short consultation, then order the date-of-death appraisal, then talk to a local agent about listing. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in the Los Angeles South Bay. I am a real estate professional and not an attorney, and Texas is not my state, so please confirm the probate route locally. If you would like, I am glad to help you find a solid agent in the Terrell area who has handled estate sales. Zoltan

Harper, since you asked this the rules changed in your favor, and none of the 25 answers above mention it: as of NAR's Multiple Listing Options for Sellers policy, fully implemented by September 30, 2025, there is now a formal "delayed marketing exempt listing" category that lets you do exactly what you are describing without breaking any policy. Here is the landscape, because "private listing" means three different things and only one of them is a bad idea. Office exclusive. Your listing is marketed only inside your agent's brokerage. It is not in the MLS, it is not syndicated, and it is not publicly advertised anywhere. This has always been permitted, and it is genuinely private. The exposure is limited to that one firm's agents and their buyers. Delayed marketing exempt listing. This is the new option. Your listing is filed with the MLS but public marketing through IDX and syndication is held back for a defined window. Other agents in the MLS can see it. The public portals cannot. At the end of the window it goes live everywhere automatically. This is usually what a seller actually wants when they say "test the waters." Publicly marketed but withheld from the MLS. This is the one to avoid. Under the Clear Cooperation Policy, once a listing is publicly marketed it has to be submitted to the MLS within one business day. NAR also clarified that one-to-one, broker-to-broker conversations do not count as public marketing, but multi-brokerage communication about your listing does. So a coming-soon sign, a social post, or a blast to a group of brokerages triggers the requirement. Sellers who try to do both usually end up creating a policy problem for their agent rather than an advantage for themselves. Now your actual question: will it cost you money. Honestly, usually yes, a little, and here is the mechanism. Price is set by competition among buyers, and competition requires buyers to know. A property that quietly changes hands inside one brokerage never faced the full pool. Sometimes that costs nothing because the right buyer happened to be in that pool. Sometimes it costs a lot. You never find out which, and that uncertainty is the real cost. The second cost is that your best pricing signal comes from the first two weeks of full exposure. A private period consumes freshness without generating that signal. When you go public afterward, you have already burned the window where buyer urgency is highest. Where private genuinely makes sense: privacy has independent value to you (public figure, sensitive circumstances, tenants you do not want disturbed), the home is not ready to show and you want feedback before spending on prep, or your market is so supply-starved that you are confident of multiple offers regardless. My suggestion. Use the delayed marketing option rather than a true office exclusive, and cap it at a short window, one to two weeks. You get the quiet test, the MLS agents can still bring buyers, and you have not spent your freshness. Your agent will have you sign a disclosure acknowledging you understand you are waiving immediate public marketing, which is required under the policy, and reading it is a useful exercise in itself. I am a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and if your home is near the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Torrance, Redondo Beach or San Pedro I am glad to talk through whether a delayed window makes sense for your specific property. Elsewhere, tell me where you are and I will connect you with a strong agent in my network who is current on this policy, which not everyone is. Zoltan

Olivia, tax certificates can be a legitimate investment in Florida, but they are widely misunderstood, so let me lay out how the system actually works before you put money in. The mechanics: each county tax collector auctions certificates on the prior year's unpaid property taxes, with sales held by June 1. You are not buying the property. You are paying someone's tax bill in exchange for the right to collect it back with interest. Bidding starts at 18 percent and gets bid down in quarter-point steps; the certificate goes to whoever accepts the lowest rate. On popular properties, competition drives rates way down. Florida does have a cushion: unless you bid 0 percent, a redeemed certificate generally pays a minimum 5 percent penalty even if your winning rate was lower and the owner redeems quickly. What usually happens: the owner redeems (pays up), you get your money plus interest, done. That is the realistic base case, and it makes this an interest-rate investment, not a "get houses cheap" play. What rarely happens: if the certificate goes unpaid for two years from April 1 of the issuance year, you can apply for a tax deed, which pushes the property toward public auction. Even then you usually get outbid or paid off rather than ending up owning anything, and if you do end up near ownership, title on tax deed properties needs an attorney's help to clean up before it is insurable. Homework before your first auction: - Pick one or two counties and study their online auction platform; each county runs its own. - Research the parcels behind the certificates. A certificate on a worthless sliver of swamp is a worthless certificate. - Only invest money you can leave parked for two-plus years. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney or financial advisor, so treat this as orientation rather than investment advice. I work in Los Angeles' South Bay, and if you decide you want actual income property in Florida instead of paper, I am happy to connect you with a strong local agent from my network there. Zoltan

Stephanie, you already have the document that settles this and it is probably in a folder from your closing: your owner's title policy. Go to Schedule B, the exceptions section. Every recorded easement affecting your lot is listed there by name and recording number. If a front to back easement exists between your properties, it is on that page. If it is not on that page, it almost certainly does not exist as a recorded easement. That one lookup is free, takes ten minutes, and is more authoritative than anything your neighbor or the HOA tells you. The thread has covered plats, surveys and prescriptive easements well, so let me address the two specific claims your neighbor made, because they are separate issues and he is running them together. Claim one, that there is an easement between all properties in the subdivision. Possible, and if it exists it will be on the recorded plat and in your Schedule B. Side-yard utility easements running front to back are genuinely common in subdivisions, typically a strip a few feet wide along one or both side lot lines for utility lines. Note what that kind of easement actually is: it is a right for a utility to access and maintain lines. It is not a right for your neighbor to walk through, park on, or control your yard. People confuse "there is an easement" with "my neighbor has rights here." Usually the beneficiary is the utility company or the association, not the guy next door. Claim two, that your fence should be five feet from the property line rather than three. This is almost certainly a setback question, not an easement question, and they are different things. A setback is a zoning rule about where you may build. An easement is a property right someone else holds. His five foot number may be from the subdivision's recorded covenants, the HOA architectural rules, or the local fence ordinance, and all three are plausible. Ask him one question: where does the five feet come from, and can you show me the document. If he cannot produce it, it is not a rule, it is a preference. What I would do, in order. Pull Schedule B of your title policy. If you cannot find it, the title company that closed your purchase will send you a copy, usually free. Pull the recorded subdivision plat from the county recorder. It shows platted easements graphically. Ask the HOA to point to the specific section of the covenants for the five foot claim, in writing. If those three come back clean and he keeps pressing, then a boundary survey is worth the few hundred dollars, because it converts an argument into a fact. Do not start with the survey. Start with the documents you already have. One practical note: if you built the fence with an HOA architectural approval, keep that approval handy. Approved construction is very hard for anyone to complain about after the fact. I am a real estate professional and not an attorney or a surveyor, and boundary and easement disputes are legal questions, so if this escalates past documents, an hour with a real estate attorney in your state is the right next step. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay. If you are elsewhere, tell me where and I will connect you with a strong agent in my network who can point you to the right local resources. Zoltan

Jolene, here is the exact line to look at, which will end the confusion faster than any explanation: on your Closing Disclosure, go to page 3, Section L, "Paid Already by or on Behalf of Borrower at Closing." There is a line labeled Deposit. Your earnest money is on that line, and it is subtracted from what you owe at the table. That is the answer to all three of your questions at once, so let me connect them. You do not get the money back as a check, and you did not lose it. It is applied. It sits in escrow from the day you deliver it until closing, and at closing it comes off your side of the ledger as a credit, reducing the cash you have to bring. So if you owe $15,000 to close and you put down $5,000 in earnest money, you wire $10,000. You "got it back" in the sense that it went to work for you. It is just that it never came back to your hands to do it. Whether it goes to your closing costs or your down payment is a distinction without a difference. It is a credit against everything you owe. Some people find it easier to think of it as the first installment of your down payment, which is usually accurate. So your realtor is probably right and probably said it in a way that sounded like a refund was coming. That is the most common miscommunication in this whole business, and you are far from the first person to sit at a closing table expecting a check. Where it is not applied, and this is the part worth knowing: If you close, it is credited to you. If you cancel within a contingency that is still in effect, you normally get it returned, as an actual check or wire, some days after both parties sign a release. If you default outside your contingencies, the seller may be entitled to keep it, and in many contracts that is capped as liquidated damages, meaning the deposit is the seller's entire remedy rather than the starting point. If the two sides disagree, the escrow holder cannot decide. They hold the money until both parties sign or a court rules. In a genuine standoff the escrow company can file what is called an interpleader, which hands the money to a court to sort out. That is rare and expensive and both sides usually settle first. What to do this week. Ask your lender or your title company for your Closing Disclosure at least three days before closing, which is when you are entitled to it, and read Section L. If your deposit is not on the Deposit line, ask why before you sign anything. That single check catches most earnest money errors, and they do happen. I am a real estate professional and not an attorney. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay, so if you are anywhere near the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Torrance or San Pedro I am glad to read the Closing Disclosure with you. If you are elsewhere, tell me where and I will connect you with a good agent in my network. Zoltan