Answers by Zoltan Peresztegi

Sharon, your arithmetic is right. $115,000 plus a one-time 10 percent charge of $11,500 is $126,500, and $126,500 over 120 months is $1,054.17, so your $1,055 is correct. Nobody in this thread checked that, and it matters, because the structure works exactly as you described it. The thread has already covered the important regulatory point, which is that the Dodd-Frank and SAFE Act owner-financing restrictions apply to residential dwellings and not to a commercial building, so you have far more freedom here than a homeowner would. I will not re-explain that. What has not been raised is the part I would actually worry about, and it is a tax question rather than a legal one. Look at what your structure yields. You are advancing $115,000 and collecting $126,500 over ten years. Because you are being repaid steadily, the average balance outstanding over that decade is roughly half the original amount, so your actual annual return works out to somewhere around two percent. That is not a usury problem, it is the opposite: it is well below market. Which raises imputed interest. The IRS has rules for seller-financed sales that look at whether the stated interest is at least the applicable federal rate published for that month and term. Where the stated interest is too low, the IRS can treat part of what you receive as interest anyway, recharacterizing money you thought was principal. The practical consequences are that you may owe ordinary income tax on interest you did not think you were charging, and the buyer's deduction changes too. This is precisely the situation your structure creates, because a one-time 10 percent charge spread over ten years produces a very low effective rate. That is not a reason to abandon your plan. It is a reason to have a CPA look at it before you sign, and to have the note written with an explicit stated interest rate that satisfies the rules, rather than as a flat add-on. Your monthly payment can still come out at $1,055. It is the labeling on the note that changes. Three other things I would get right while you are at it. Put it on a proper promissory note secured by a recorded mortgage or deed of trust against the building, not on a contract for deed or land contract. Kansas recognizes both approaches, but with a recorded lien you have a clear remedy if payments stop. With a contract for deed the remedy can be slower and messier, and you may end up in a foreclosure-style proceeding anyway. Consider a balloon. Ten years is a long time to hold paper on a commercial building. A five year balloon with the same $1,055 payment gives the buyer time to refinance and gives you an exit, and it is a normal structure that buyers accept. Require proof of insurance naming you as mortgagee, and require evidence that property taxes are paid annually. The two ways seller-carried notes go bad are an uninsured loss and a tax foreclosure that wipes out your lien position. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney or a CPA, and this is squarely both. In Kansas, have a real estate attorney draft the note and the security instrument, and have a CPA confirm the interest treatment before you sign. That is a few hundred dollars against a $126,500 obligation you are relying on for ten years. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay, so Kansas is outside my market. If you want an introduction to someone who handles commercial sales in eastern Kansas, tell me and I will find you a good one through my network. Zoltan

Diane, here is the direct answer to all four of your questions: there is no minimum size, no door requirement, shelves are fine, and it does not have to be built in, because no model building code in the United States requires a bedroom closet in the first place. You cannot have a size requirement for something that is not required to exist. Taking them one at a time, since you asked them separately. How large. No code number exists. What does exist is convention, and conventions are set by local appraisers and local buyers, not by rule. A standard reach-in closet in most American homes is roughly two feet deep and wide enough to hang clothes, but a smaller one does not disqualify anything. Does it need doors. No. Open closets, curtained closets and doorless nooks all function as closets. Doors matter for photographs and for how finished the room reads, not for whether the room is a bedroom. Can it be just shelves. Yes, though I would add a hanging rod if you have the height, because buyers walking through do a quick mental test of whether their clothes fit, and shelves alone fail that test even when the square footage is identical. That is a presentation issue, not a compliance one. Does it have to be built in. No. A freestanding wardrobe or armoire works, and someone above already mentioned that. The one caveat is that furniture leaves with you, so if the room genuinely has nowhere to put clothes, the buyer will notice the absence after your wardrobe is gone. If that is the situation, a simple framed reach-in is usually inexpensive and permanent. What actually governs whether the room is a bedroom, and this connects to your other question: the room needs proper emergency escape and rescue, meaning an operable window or door meeting your local egress requirements, and it needs to meet minimum habitable room standards. That is the code test. Everything about closets is convention and marketing. The practical version for someone about to list. Your county property appraiser record and the appraiser on your buyer's loan are the two that determine how the room gets counted in your transaction. If the county record already says three bedrooms and the room has a compliant window, you are in good shape and the closet is entirely a staging decision. If the county says two, fix that record first, because no amount of closet solves a records mismatch. If your goal is simply for the room to photograph and show as a bedroom, the cheapest effective version is a queen bed, two nightstands and a wardrobe against the wall where a closet would go. Buyers respond to whether they can picture sleeping in it, and that setup answers the question before anyone thinks to ask it. I am a real estate professional and not a building official or an appraiser, so if you want certainty on the egress question, one call to your county building department settles it. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay, so I am not licensed in Florida. Tell me your county and I will connect you with a strong Florida agent in my network who can look at the room and the county record together, which is really what decides this. Zoltan

Diane, a closet is not what makes a bedroom in Florida, and the room can very likely be called a third bedroom. But there are three different authorities that count bedrooms and they do not agree, so the useful question is which one is about to matter to you. The code answer, which others here have already given, is that the Florida Building Code does not require a closet. What it does regulate for a sleeping room is emergency escape and rescue, meaning the room needs a window or door that meets egress requirements, plus minimum habitable-room standards. A window alone is not automatically enough. It has to be an operable window of the required size and sill height. That is the check your building department can do for you over the phone. Here are the other two authorities, which nobody has mentioned and which will decide your actual situation. The county property appraiser record. In Florida, this is where most listings and most buyers get the bedroom count, and it is publicly searchable. Look yours up. If it says two bedrooms and you market three, that mismatch is what a buyer's agent will find, and it becomes an argument at exactly the wrong moment. If it says three, you are on solid ground. If it is wrong in either direction, the appraiser's office has a process to correct it and you want that done before you list, not during escrow. The appraiser on your buyer's loan. They follow measurement standards, commonly ANSI, and they exercise judgment on whether a room functions as a bedroom. A windowless interior room will not count regardless of what anything else says. A room with proper egress and no closet usually will, though some appraisers will note the absence. Also, since you mentioned a townhouse: check your governing documents and the original builder plans. Some associations and some recorded plans specify unit configurations, and it is worth thirty seconds to confirm nothing there conflicts. What I would do, in order. Call your county building department, describe the room and its window, and ask whether it meets sleeping room egress. Then pull your property appraiser record online. Those two calls cost nothing and take an afternoon, and between them you will know with certainty rather than by consensus. If both come back clean, market it as a three bedroom and add a closet only if you want to, not because you have to. If you do want one, a freestanding wardrobe presents nearly as well in photos as a built-in and can be done in a weekend for a small fraction of the cost of framing. I am a real estate professional and not a building official or an appraiser, and code editions and local amendments change, so confirm the egress question with your building department rather than relying on any of us. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay, so Florida is outside my market. Tell me your county and I will connect you with a strong Florida agent in my network who deals with the property appraiser records there routinely. Zoltan

Serenity, the reason to do this is not the appraised value, it is the search filter: a buyer who sets a four bedroom minimum will never see a three bedroom listing, no matter how good the loft is. You are not buying value, you are buying visibility to a pool of buyers who currently cannot find your house. The thread has covered egress, ceiling height, closets and permits well, so I will not repeat any of it. Two things to add instead. The first is that "would this increase the value" is the wrong measure and it is why these threads go in circles. An appraiser adjusts for bedroom count, and that adjustment is usually modest. What is not modest is the difference between appearing in a search and not appearing in it. A three bedroom listing competes against every other three bedroom listing. A four bedroom listing competes in a smaller, often better funded pool, and it also shows up for every buyer who filtered at three. You gain a market, not a line item. The second is the thing to protect. A loft's actual appeal is the open volume, the light and the connection to the space below. Wall it in and you may gain a bedroom and lose the feature that made buyers remember the house. This is a real trade and only you can walk your house and judge it. My rule of thumb: if the loft overlooks a two story great room and is the visual centerpiece of the home, closing it costs more than it earns. If it is a leftover space over a garage that nobody uses, close it and never look back. Practical checks before you spend anything. Ask your agent to pull, from the MLS, how many three bedroom and how many four bedroom homes sold in your area in the last twelve months, and the median price of each. That is a fifteen minute request and it answers your question with local data rather than with anyone's opinion, including mine. If the four bedroom median is meaningfully higher and the inventory is thinner, do it. If they sell for nearly the same, do not. Confirm with your city that the work will be permitted as a bedroom, not just as "finish existing space." The permit is what lets your agent list it as a bedroom without exposure, and an unpermitted bedroom is worse than a loft, because it becomes a disclosure item and, in some markets, a lender problem. And confirm the square footage will not change. If the loft is already counted in your finished square footage, closing it adds a bedroom without adding footage, which is the cheapest version of this project. If it is not currently counted, you may gain footage too, which is a bigger win but a bigger permit conversation. One last thing that costs nothing: if you decide against building walls, have your agent describe it as a loft or bonus room that "can serve as a fourth bedroom" in the remarks. That does not get you into the filter, but it does get you into the read. I am a real estate professional and not a contractor or an appraiser, so let your city and a licensed contractor confirm what the space can legally become. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I list homes in Los Angeles and the South Bay. If you are near the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Torrance, Redondo Beach or San Pedro I am glad to walk it with you and pull those bedroom-count numbers. Elsewhere, tell me where and I will connect you with a strong agent in my network. Zoltan

Gerry, there is a way to settle this that does not involve either of you arguing about the number: ask the agent for two statistics from their own business over the last twelve months. Their average list-to-sale price ratio, and the percentage of their listings that expired or were withdrawn without selling. Those two numbers tell you almost everything, and nobody in this thread has suggested asking for them. Here is how to read the answer. An agent whose listings sell at or above asking price is not systematically underpricing. That is what a high list-to-sale ratio means. If they tell you 99 or 100 percent, their pricing advice is producing full-price results, and the "underprice to sell fast" theory does not hold up. If they come back at 93 percent, they are consistently listing above where the market lands and then reducing, which is the opposite of your worry but also not good. A low expired rate means their pricing is realistic. A high one means they take listings at the seller's number and then fail to sell them, which sounds like it favors you until you realize that being the seller of an expired listing is the worst outcome available. Your house sits, gets stale, and eventually sells for less than the honest number would have brought. A good agent will have these numbers or can pull them in ten minutes. An agent who deflects, gets defensive, or says the question is unfair has told you what you needed to know. That reaction is more informative than the number. Two more things, since the thread has covered getting a second opinion thoroughly. Ask for the net sheet at both prices, not the list prices. Have the agent show you your actual proceeds at their number and at your number, with commission, closing costs and estimated carrying cost for the extra weeks the higher price would take. Sellers argue about list price and get paid on net proceeds. Sometimes the gap you are fighting over is a few thousand dollars in your pocket and eight extra weeks of mortgage payments, and the argument resolves itself the moment you see it written down. And ask what the plan is if the higher number does not produce showings. A serious agent will say something specific: two weeks, and if we have fewer than X showings and no offers, we reduce to Y on this date. That converts your disagreement into a test with a deadline instead of a standoff. Most sellers who insist on their number and get it in writing this way end up fine, because the market answers the question within about three weeks and everyone gets to stop guessing. One honest note. You said it feels like they want to underprice to sell quickly. That does happen. It is also true that the commission difference to an agent between your number and theirs is small, while the difference between selling and not selling is everything, which is why their incentive is more often toward "sells" than toward "sells cheap." Not always. But the statistics above will tell you which kind of agent you are sitting with, and you have not signed anything, so you are in exactly the right position to ask. I am a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and if your home is anywhere near the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Torrance, Redondo Beach or San Pedro I am glad to give you an independent read at no cost and no obligation. If you are outside my area, tell me where you are and I will connect you with an agent in my network who will hand you those two statistics without being asked twice. Zoltan

Chris, run the arithmetic before you accept anyone's "no": $110,000 on a $239,000 house is about 46 percent down, and you only need to borrow $129,000. That is not a normal low-credit file. That is a lender being asked to lend just over half the value of the house, and it opens doors that are closed to someone putting 5 percent down with the same scores. Several people have already covered manual underwriting and portfolio lending, so I will point you at the specific things to do rather than repeat the product list. First, get your actual reports, not scores. Pull all three from annualcreditreport.com, which is free. Scores of 486 and 543 with that much cash usually mean one of three things, and they have very different fixes: - A handful of old collections or charge-offs still reporting. Often the cheapest thing to fix. - One recent major event, a foreclosure, bankruptcy or repossession. These have waiting periods, and knowing the exact date matters more than the score does. - Errors. More common than people expect, and free to dispute. You cannot pick a strategy until you know which one you have. Do this first, this week. Second, ask a lender about a rapid rescore. This is the tool almost nobody tells consumers about, because you cannot buy it yourself. A lender initiates it. If you pay down or resolve specific accounts, a rapid rescore updates your bureau file in a matter of days rather than waiting a full reporting cycle. When someone is sitting just below a threshold, this can move them over it in a week or two rather than two months. With your cash position, paying off a few small balances outright is trivially affordable, and the score movement can be substantial. Third, apply as one borrower if it helps. On a joint application most lenders qualify on the lower middle score. If the 543 borrower alone qualifies for what you need using only their income, taking the 486 off the loan (they can still be on title) may be the single fastest path. Ask the lender to run it both ways. Many will not think to offer this. Fourth, and this is the one worth taking seriously at your loan-to-value: seller financing. On a $239,000 house where you bring $110,000, a seller who owns free and clear is being asked to carry $129,000 secured by a house worth $239,000. From the seller's side that is a very well protected note, and sellers of paid-off homes sometimes prefer the income stream to a lump sum. This will not work on most listings, but it works on some, and the ones where it works are usually inherited properties and long-held homes. Ask your agent to identify those and ask the question. The answer is usually no, and no costs you nothing. Two cautions. Be careful with credit repair companies that charge monthly and promise deletions. Most of what they do you can do yourself for free, and the good outcome is usually just time plus paying things off. And do not spend the entire $110,000 on the down payment. Underwriters want to see reserves left after closing, and with credit like this, reserves are exactly the compensating factor that gets a manual underwrite approved. I am a real estate professional and not a lender, and score thresholds and lender overlays change, so get current numbers from two or three lenders rather than one. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay. If you are anywhere near the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Torrance or San Pedro I am glad to introduce you to lenders who actually do manual underwriting instead of declining and moving on. If you are elsewhere, tell me where and I will connect you with an agent and a lender in my network. Zoltan

Kyle, you can usually merge them, and in most cases you should not, because a lot merger is a one-way door: separating them again later means a new subdivision or parcel map application, which is discretionary, slow and sometimes simply denied. Two separate legal parcels are an asset. One larger parcel is a preference. Preferences are cheap to have without giving up the asset. Taking your three questions in order. Can you merge them. Almost certainly yes. Most jurisdictions have a lot merger or lot consolidation process, usually handled by the planning department, and it is far easier than splitting. Ease of merging is exactly why people do it without thinking, and why the regret comes later. Should you. Only if merging solves a concrete problem. The legitimate reasons are narrow: you want to build a structure that would straddle the existing property line, your setback rules make the two parcels individually unusable, or a single larger parcel unlocks a zoning category you want. If none of those apply, keeping two parcels preserves the ability to sell one, gift one, build a second dwelling under separate ownership, or borrow against one without encumbering the other. That optionality is real money and it costs you almost nothing to keep, since two tax bills is an inconvenience rather than an expense. There is a marketing consideration too, and it runs both directions. A single large parcel with a house and a pool is a lifestyle property and sells to a narrow, sometimes very well-funded, buyer pool. Two parcels, one improved and one buildable, sells to that same buyer plus every builder in the area. In most markets the second pool is larger, which is why I would not collapse it voluntarily. Now the taxes, which is where the real caution is. Tearing down the house lowers the improvement value, because assessors value land and improvements separately. So yes, your bill will likely go down. But there are two traps. First, the demolition itself. Some jurisdictions treat a demolition and the subsequent work as new construction, and in California new construction triggers reassessment of the affected portion under Proposition 13. Adding a pool is new construction. So you can end up removing improvement value and adding it back at current rates. Second, the merger. Combining parcels can itself prompt a reassessment of how the combined property is valued, and vacant land in some jurisdictions is assessed on its highest and best use rather than its current use, which for a buildable infill lot near a house can be higher per acre than you expect. Neither of these is a reason not to proceed. They are reasons to make one phone call before you do anything. Call your county assessor's office, describe the exact sequence (buy, demolish, possibly merge, possibly add a pool), and ask what each step does to the assessment. They answer this question all day and they answer it for free. Do that before you close on the neighbor's property, not after, because the answer might change whether you want the parcels merged at all. I am a real estate professional and not a tax adviser or a land use attorney, and merger procedure varies enormously by state and county. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay, where lot merger and Proposition 13 questions come up constantly on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If you are in this area I am glad to help you think through the sequence. If you are elsewhere, tell me where and I will connect you with a strong agent in my network. Zoltan

Nancy, the reason you cannot find these is that "half a duplex" is not what they are called in the listings. Search for "half duplex", "twin home", "duplex condo" and "townhouse", and in most MLS systems you will also want to check the property subtype field rather than relying on the keyword search, because that is where the distinction actually lives. What you are describing exists in two different legal forms, and they are not interchangeable. Knowing which one you are looking at is the whole job. Form one, a condominium. The building was converted by recording a condominium map or plat that creates two units. Each owner gets a separate deed to their unit and an undivided interest in the common elements, usually the roof, the exterior, and sometimes the land. There is almost always an association, even a tiny two-member one, and there are governing documents. This is common and it is financeable, but a two-unit association is treated as a small project by lenders and some will have extra requirements. Form two, separate legal parcels. The land was actually divided by a recorded parcel map, so each half sits on its own legally described lot with its own parcel number, and the two buildings share a wall. This is what people usually mean when they say "full ownership," and it is what you want if the goal is genuine independence. Documents to look for are a recorded party wall agreement (which governs who pays for the shared wall, and how repairs and access work) and often a shared driveway or utility easement. Practical steps that will actually get you there. Ask an agent to search the MLS by subtype rather than by keyword, and to check the county assessor for each candidate. The tell is simple: two separate parcel numbers means two legal parcels. One parcel number with two unit designations means condominium. That single lookup answers the question in a minute and it is free. For anything in Reno or Sparks, the county is Washoe, and Washoe County's assessor and recorder records are where the parcel map, the condominium map and the party wall agreement will be. Have the title company pull them before you go far. Two cautions from watching these transactions. If it is a true two-parcel arrangement without a recorded party wall agreement, that is a real gap, not a technicality. Roof and wall repairs on a shared structure with no written framework is how neighbors end up in court. If there is no agreement, ask whether the two owners will sign one as a condition of sale. If there is no formal association but there are shared systems, find out how sewer, water and the roof are handled. Shared laterals and a single roof with no maintenance agreement can be a bigger issue than the ownership form. Financing is generally straightforward for both structures, but the lender will want to know which one it is up front, so tell them on the first call. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional in Los Angeles and the South Bay, so Reno and Sparks are outside my market and I do not have listings there. Tell me and I will connect you with a strong agent in my network in Washoe County who can run the subtype search properly, which is really what you need here rather than a listing link. Zoltan

Fun question, Jeremiah, and I can see why those headlines grab you. But since you are in California, let me give you the straight answer with the actual law behind it, because the thread above is a little fuzzy and a couple of folks are answering for other states. Short version: no, you cannot legally raffle off your own home in California for your own benefit. Here is why. Under California Penal Code section 320.5, a raffle is only legal when it is run by an eligible nonprofit, one that is tax exempt, has been qualified to do business in the state for at least a year, and has registered with the California Attorney General's Registry of Charities and Fundraisers before selling a single ticket. A private homeowner selling tickets to cash out a house is not that. In the eyes of the state it is an illegal lottery, and that can carry real civil and even criminal exposure. This is not a gray area. There is a second catch that kills the money math even on the legal path. That same law requires at least 90 percent of the gross ticket sales to go to the charity's cause. So even a properly run raffle is a fundraising tool for a nonprofit, not a way for you to net your home's value. You would not get to keep the proceeds. A few more things worth knowing before you fall for one of those stories: - The viral "$1 tickets, two million buyers" tales are almost always either run overseas, where the rules are completely different, or run through a registered charity. And plenty of US home raffles quietly fall apart when they do not sell enough tickets, so the organizer has to refund everyone and is out the marketing cost. - People will point you to a "skill contest" or a "no purchase necessary" sweepstakes as a workaround. It exists in theory, but for real estate it is a legal minefield with disclosure, bonding, and escrow rules, and it needs a specialized attorney. It rarely pencils out for a single house. - Even if you cleared every legal hurdle, you would still have to pay off your mortgage and any liens before title could transfer, the winner would owe income tax on the full market value of the "free" house (a nasty surprise for them), and you would still owe your own capital gains. The house does not change hands tax free just because it was a prize. So here is how I would think about it. If your real goal is maximum exposure and top dollar, the legal versions of "lots of buyers competing" are a real estate auction or a sharply marketed open-market listing, and both can create that bidding energy without the legal risk. If your goal is genuinely to benefit a cause, then partner with a registered California 501(c)(3) that already knows the raffle registration process and let them run it the right way. Quick disclaimer: I am a California Realtor, not an attorney, so if you still want to explore the charity route, have a California gaming or nonprofit attorney structure it before you sell any tickets. 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 from my network who can run the numbers on a straight sale or an auction and show you what your home would actually bring. Happy to take follow-ups right here too. Zoltan

Anupama, I am a Seniors Real Estate Specialist (SRES) and I work with buyers in your age bracket constantly, so let me give you the honest version first: at $300,000 there is no single family house in Santa Clara County. The median condo in the county is around $970,000. Your budget is real, but it does not buy a house there, and any answer that suggests otherwise is wasting your time. That said, there are three genuine paths, and one of them is worth far more than the others if it applies to you. First, and nobody in this thread has raised it: if you currently own a home in California, Proposition 19 is the most valuable thing available to you. Since April 2021, a California homeowner aged 55 or over can transfer the property tax base year value of their primary residence to a replacement primary residence anywhere in the state, of any value, up to three times. If the replacement costs more than what you sell, the difference is added to your transferred base rather than the whole property being reassessed. Why this matters to your specific question: you set a $1,500 monthly ceiling. In Santa Clara County a big share of that payment is property tax. If you can carry a low base year value with you from a home you have owned for years, your monthly cost on the same purchase price can be dramatically lower than a buyer starting fresh. That can change what price you can actually afford, not just what you pay in taxes. Santa Clara County charges a $110 non-refundable fee to process the claim, and there are filing deadlines, so ask the County Assessor's office before you list anything. If you do not currently own in California, Prop 19 does not help and the other two paths are what you have. The paths already covered above (below market rate ownership and manufactured housing) are legitimate and I would follow up on both. Two things to add. On the below market rate side, the City of San Jose runs an affordable ownership program with published income limits tied to area median income, which for the county is currently around $195,200 for the standard family size, so the qualifying thresholds are higher in absolute dollars than people expect. Get the actual limits from the City of San Jose Housing Department rather than a general website, and ask specifically about the waiting list and the resale restriction, because BMR units carry a long-term price cap that limits your future equity. That is not a reason to skip it. It is a reason to understand it before you commit. Third path, and the one most people in your situation eventually take: widen the geography. Within a reasonable drive of Santa Clara County there are markets where $300,000 is a real budget for a condo or a small home. Whether that trade is worth it depends on why you are anchored to San Jose. If it is family or medical care, stay and take the BMR route. If it is habit, look wider. One more thing specific to buying at 60. Ask any lender you talk to about qualifying on retirement and asset income, not just employment income, because if you are near retirement the way your income is documented can change your approval more than your credit score does. And ask about how long you intend to hold, because the math on buying versus renting narrows considerably over a short horizon. I am a real estate professional, not a lender or a tax adviser, so confirm the Proposition 19 specifics directly with the Santa Clara County Assessor and your CPA. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, SRES, and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay, so Santa Clara County is outside my market and I will not pretend otherwise. If you want, I will connect you with a strong agent in my network up there who actually works the BMR inventory, and I am glad to answer California-wide questions like the Prop 19 one any time. Zoltan

Scott, your agent has it backwards, and the number tells you why: a $48,000 gap on a manufactured home is usually not an appraiser error, it is the appraiser applying a different valuation approach than the seller's asking price assumed. To your literal question first, since someone already mentioned a reconsideration of value: it is common, it is now a formal process, and you are entitled to one. For applications dated on or after October 31, 2024, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and FHA follow a standardized borrower-initiated reconsideration of value process, and your lender is required to tell you how to use it. One request per appraisal, before closing. So this is a right, not a favor, and asking for it is not unreasonable behavior. But before you spend the request, understand what you are probably looking at. Manufactured homes are appraised against other manufactured homes, not against site-built houses. There are usually far fewer of them nearby, so appraisers reach further for comparables, and the further they reach the more adjustments they make. A $242,000 opinion against a $290,000 ask often means the seller priced against site-built houses in the area and the appraiser did not. Three things to check in the report right now: - What comparables did the appraiser use? If they are site-built, that is a real error and worth an ROV. If they are manufactured, look at how far away and how old. - Does the report reference the HUD data plate and certification label? Age, size and HUD compliance drive the value, and if the appraiser had bad data on any of those, that is correctable. - Is the home legally real property? A manufactured home is financed as real estate only once it is permanently affixed and that affixation is recorded. In California that recording is done on Form 433A, and other states have their own version. If it has not been done, some financing is simply unavailable, and that alone can suppress what the market will pay. Now, about your agent. Her reaction told you something and you read it correctly. "I'm in shock" that the appraisal protects you is not the reaction of someone whose incentives are pointed at you. The right reaction was some version of "good, now we have leverage, let me pull the comps and see whether the appraiser or the seller is closer to right." What you actually do next, in order: get the full report, not a summary. Read the comparable grid. If the comparables are wrong, file the ROV with documentation. If the comparables are right, go back to the seller at or near $242,000 and be prepared to walk, because a lender just told you in writing what the house is worth and that lender has no reason to lie to you. And check your appraisal contingency. On a manufactured home it is the single most valuable clause in your contract and you want to know its deadline before you spend two weeks on an ROV. I am a real estate professional, not an appraiser or a lender. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay. If you are in this area I am glad to look at the comparable grid with you. If you are elsewhere and you decide you want a different agent, tell me the market and I will connect you with someone in my network who will treat a low appraisal as good news for a buyer, which is what it is. Zoltan

Ted, the option you are leaning toward, tearing it out and not replacing it, is the one option that is not on the table, because on an attached garage that ceiling is required construction, not finish work. Several people have already covered fire separation and the 5/8 inch requirement, so I will not re-explain it. What has not been said is what actually happens if you leave it open, and it is more concrete than "code says so." An attached garage has to be separated from the living space. Where there is habitable space above the garage, most jurisdictions following the International Residential Code call for 5/8 inch Type X gypsum on the ceiling. Type X is not ordinary drywall, and that distinction matters when you hire someone, because a handyman quoting standard half inch board is quoting the wrong material. Here is the mechanism that turns this from a code footnote into a closing problem. Your buyer's appraiser walks the garage. An open ceiling with exposed framing and no separation is commonly written up as a health and safety deficiency, especially on FHA and VA loans. When that happens the lender requires the repair before funding. So you do not avoid the cost by skipping it. You defer it to a moment when you have no leverage, a closing date, and a buyer who now gets to pick the contractor and the timeline. That is the worst version of this expense. On your actual question, whether you recover it: not as a line item, no. Nobody pays more for a garage ceiling. That is the wrong frame though. This is not an improvement, it is a defect cure, and defect cures do not earn a return, they prevent a subtraction. The subtraction here is larger than the cost, because a visibly torn-up garage ceiling reads to buyers as deferred maintenance and, worse, as "what was leaking up there." Buyers assume water. They are usually wrong and it costs you anyway. What I would do, in order. Fix the cause first. Improper installation is your word for it, but ceilings do not usually fall from bad screws alone. Have someone look for a plumbing leak, a roof or flashing issue above, or condensation from an unconditioned space. If there is a water source you repair the ceiling twice. Then get two quotes for demo, insulation, 5/8 Type X, tape and texture. Ask specifically whether a permit is required in your city for a garage ceiling replacement. Some jurisdictions require one, some do not, and the answer matters because permitted work is easier to point to in your disclosures. Then disclose it as completed work with the invoice attached. A repaired-and-documented item is a non-event to a buyer. An unexplained new ceiling in an otherwise older garage raises the question you just spent money to avoid. Do it before you list, not during escrow. Same money, much less pain. I am a real estate professional, not a contractor or a building official, so confirm the material and permit requirements with your local building department, since jurisdictions amend the code. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I list homes in Los Angeles and the South Bay. If your house is near the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Torrance, Redondo Beach or San Pedro I am glad to walk it with you before you spend anything. Elsewhere, tell me where you are and I will connect you with a strong agent in my network. Zoltan

Chris, telling your agent and disclosing to a buyer are two separate decisions, and you are conflating them. Tell your agent everything. Whether and how it reaches a buyer is a question you answer afterward, together, with better information than you have now. The thread above has already covered the disclosure duty thoroughly, so I will not repeat it. What I want to add is why the first half of that sentence is in your interest even if you never disclose a word. An agent who does not know cannot protect you. Practical example: your agent schedules a broker open at 11am on a Saturday because that is standard. If she knows the noise starts at noon on weekends, she schedules at 9am on a Tuesday instead. That is not concealment, that is competent marketing, and you only get it if she knows. Same with which side of the house to photograph, which windows to leave closed, and how to answer a buyer who asks a direct question at an open house without lying. That last one is the real exposure. Buyers ask about neighbors constantly. It is one of the most common questions at an open house. An agent who is caught flat by it will either stammer, which reads as a problem, or answer wrong, which is worse. An agent who knows in advance has a prepared, truthful, non-catastrophic answer ready. The second reason: your agent is the one who knows your state's rules, and those rules differ enormously. In some states this is squarely disclosable. In others it is not, unless a specific question is asked. In some it depends entirely on whether there is a written record of complaints. You cannot make a good decision about disclosure without knowing which regime you are in, and your agent can tell you in one conversation. Deciding to stay quiet before you know the rule is how sellers end up on the wrong side of a claim after closing. Third, and this is the part sellers underestimate: buyers usually find out anyway. They visit the neighborhood in the evening. They talk to the neighbor on the other side. In many states a formal complaint to the city or the HOA becomes a record a diligent buyer's agent can find. Something disclosed calmly up front costs you far less than the same thing discovered late, because late discovery makes buyers wonder what else you did not say, and that is what actually kills a price. Practical suggestion. Write down what has actually happened, dates and facts, not adjectives. Give it to your agent. Then ask her two questions: under our state's rules, is this disclosable, and if it is, what is the least damaging accurate way to say it. Most of the time the accurate version is far less alarming than the version living in your head. I am a real estate professional and not an attorney, and this is one of the areas where state law varies the most, so if your agent is unsure, an hour with a real estate attorney is worth it before you list. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I list homes 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 help you think it through. If you are elsewhere, tell me where and I will connect you with an agent in my network who knows your state's disclosure rules cold. Zoltan

Todd, the fact that decides this vote is one nobody has mentioned: there is a federal rule restricting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from buying loans on property carrying a private transfer fee, but it specifically excepts fees paid to an association that uses the money to benefit the property. Your building's proposed fee looks like it falls inside that exception, which means it probably will not block financing. That is the good news, and it also means you cannot vote it down on those grounds. So the real question is narrower than "will this hurt my sale." It is "what does this cost me on the day I sell," and the answer is: it depends entirely on who pays it and how the amendment is written. Go find these three things in the actual proposed language before the vote. Who pays. You wrote that new owners pay it. Read it literally. Amendments like this are sometimes drafted as payable by the buyer and sometimes as payable at transfer, which in practice becomes a seller concession because buyers subtract it from what they are willing to offer. If it says buyer, a savvy buyer's agent will still ask you to cover it, and you will end up splitting it. Where the money goes. If it flows into a segregated capital reserve account, that is genuinely different from general operating funds, and it is what makes the FHFA exception apply cleanly. If it goes into operating, ask harder questions. Whether there is a reserve study. This is the thing I would press on. A building proposing a transfer fee "to offset future work" without a current reserve study is guessing at the size of the problem. A building with a reserve study knows what it needs and can tell you whether $3,000 per transfer actually moves the number or is a gesture. Ask for it. You are entitled to it in most states. Now, how I would vote in your shoes, given you plan to sell within five years. Your instinct that you will not receive the long-term benefit is correct, and you should not talk yourself out of it. But your other instinct is the sharper one: you suspect this is how they plan to deal with an assessment they can see coming. If that is true, the alternative is not "no fee." The alternative is a special assessment landing on you directly, all at once, and probably before you sell. A $3,000 fee at transfer is smaller than most special assessments, and it is paid at a moment when you have proceeds in hand. So my honest read: if the reserve study shows a real funding gap, this is the cheaper of two bad options for a seller on a five year horizon. If there is no reserve study, vote no and ask for one, because you are being asked to fund a number nobody has calculated. On value. A $3,000 transfer fee is a disclosed, quantified, one-time cost. Buyers price those in rationally, and they are far less damaging than the alternative most buildings end up with, which is a large unfunded reserve that shows up in the lender's questionnaire and quietly kills financing. I am a real estate professional and not an attorney, and this is a governing-document amendment, so if the language is ambiguous on who pays, one hour with an HOA attorney before the vote is money well spent. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work with condo sellers in Los Angeles and the South Bay. If your building is anywhere near Torrance, Redondo Beach, San Pedro or the Palos Verdes Peninsula I am glad to read the amendment with you. Elsewhere, tell me where and I will connect you with a strong agent in my network. Zoltan

Hi there. The thread covered whether to disclose. Let me answer the part you actually asked, which is the timeframe, because that is where the useful answer lives. There is generally no expiration date on a known material defect. Most state disclosure forms are written around what you know, not around what happened inside some lookback window. Fifteen dry years does not erase the duty. What it does is make the disclosure very easy to make well. Here is the nuance, and it is where people get tripped up. Read the exact wording of each question on your state's form, because the wording is what governs, not any general rule from the internet including mine. Ohio is a good illustration since its form is public. The water question there asks whether you know of "any previous or current water leakage, water accumulation, excess moisture or other defects" including any area below grade, with no time limit attached to that question. But the instruction underneath, about describing the repairs you completed, does carry a time reference of not longer than the past five years. So the time reference sits on how you describe the repair work, not on whether you disclose that you know about the problem. Two very different things, and if you skim the form you will read the second one as permission to skip the first. Pull the current version of your state's form and read it line by line, since these forms get revised and an old copy online may not match what you will be signing. Now the encouraging part, and I mean it. You are in about the best position a seller with a water history can be in. A one-time flood, a fix, a second sump pump added for redundancy, and fifteen years with a dry basement is a strong story. That is not a confession, it is a track record. Write it that way. Give the year it happened, what caused it, what was done, who did it, the fact that you added a second pump, and the plain statement that there has been no recurrence in fifteen years. If any of that work was permitted, pull the permit records now and have them ready, because a closed permit is one of the few pieces of paper that converts a claim into proof. Contractor invoices and any warranty help too. Then there is the practical reality that settles this whether or not the rule did. Two sump pumps are visible. Any inspector worth hiring will find them and the buyer will ask why there are two. So the disclosure is going to happen one way or another. The only variable is who says it first. A buyer who hears about a fixed problem from you, up front, with dates and paperwork, files it under "well maintained home." A buyer who discovers a second sump pump during inspection, after you said nothing, starts wondering what else went unmentioned. You control the framing only if you go first, and you lose that control the day the inspector arrives. Two honest cautions to close. Disclosure duties and forms are state specific, and a small number of states run on narrower buyer-beware rules, so confirm yours with a local agent or a real estate attorney. And I am a real estate professional, not an attorney. That said, the exposure from a non-disclosure claim can survive closing, while the cost of disclosing a problem you already solved is basically zero. That is a lopsided trade. I work with buyers and sellers across Los Angeles, the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. You did not say where the house is, so if it is outside my area I am glad to connect you with a strong agent from my network. My name is Zoltan Peresztegi, and my honest read is that you have a good story here, so tell it. Zoltan

Hi there. The thread has the headline right, so let me give you the part that actually decides these cases. The test is not whether the water problem was fixed. The test is whether a reasonable buyer would want to know about it. A repaired water problem is still disclosable, and here is the thing sellers get backwards: the repair is what protects you, not silence about it. Start with the single most common seller misconception on this subject. Selling as is does not waive the disclosure duty in most states. As is generally means you will not make repairs. It does not mean you may conceal known defects. California makes waiver of the statutory disclosure void as a matter of public policy. Pennsylvania has no as-is exception to the duty to disclose known material defects. In Texas, checking the as-is box does not relieve a residential seller of the obligation to disclose known defects and adverse conditions. A few places are closer to buyer beware with narrower duties, Alabama being the clearest example and Virginia running on a similar principle while still requiring a disclosure statement. But if you are counting on as is to cover you, you are almost certainly wrong about your state. Second, the practical reason non-disclosure usually fails anyway. Water mitigation is visible. A sump pump, a French drain, an interior perimeter drain, epoxy injection in a foundation crack, efflorescence on block, a suspiciously new section of finished basement wall. A competent inspector notices all of it, and the buyer's next question is why. At that moment you have converted a manageable disclosure into something that looks like concealment, and the deal usually dies over the appearance rather than the water. So here is the reframe that actually helps sellers comply, and it is the part most people miss. Do not disclose the problem alone. Disclose the problem, the fix, and the documentation together. Name what happened and when, and what was done and who did it. Attach the contractor invoice, the permit if the work was permitted, any transferable warranty, and the date the work was completed. Then state plainly how many seasons have passed with a dry basement since. A bare line on a seller property disclosure that says "water issue" with no context is genuinely frightening to a buyer, because their imagination fills the gap with something worse than the truth. A documented repair with a paper trail reads as a solved problem and a careful owner. Same underlying fact, completely different buyer reaction. Now the risk side, honestly stated. Failing to disclose a known material defect can support a fraud or misrepresentation claim after closing, and those claims survive the closing table. Yes, a statute of limitations exists, but it varies by state and by the type of claim, and quietly betting that the clock runs out before a buyer notices a wet wall is not a plan, it is a wager with your equity. Two closing notes. Disclosure forms and duties are state specific, and the forms get revised over time, so the current version of your state's form is the authority here, not any general rule from an internet answer including mine. And I am a real estate professional, not an attorney. On anything involving a known defect with real dollars attached, spend an hour with a real estate attorney in your state. It is the cheapest part of the transaction. I work with buyers and sellers across Los Angeles, the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula, where our water issues tend to be slope drainage and hillside runoff rather than basements, and the disclosure principle is identical. You did not say where you are, so if you are outside my area I am glad to introduce you to a strong agent from my network. My name is Zoltan Peresztegi, and my advice is simple: disclose it, document it, and go first. Zoltan

Hi there. Good news first, and it is the part that got skipped above: a listing that is expiring does not need to be cancelled. It simply ends on its expiration date, by itself, with no signature required from anyone. So Thursday will take care of itself. That said, I would not let it end quietly. Ask the broker of record at the listing brokerage, not just your agent, for a short written release confirming that the listing has expired and that the firm claims no further rights in the property. An email is fine. A verbal handoff is what leaves you exposed, because the one thing that can still cost you money after Thursday is the protection period. Here is what that is. Most listing agreements contain a protection clause, sometimes called a holdover or safety clause, that preserves the brokerage's commission claim for a stated window after expiration, often somewhere around 30 to 45 days, if the home later sells to a buyer the brokerage worked with during the listing. It is not a trick. It exists so an agent does not do all the work and then get cut out at the finish line. But it only makes sense if you know who is on the list. So when you ask for the written release, ask in the same message for the written list of protected buyers. If nobody was shown the home, that list should come back empty, and you will have that in writing. If it comes back with names on it, you now know exactly which buyers to steer clear of for the protection window. Whether relisting with another firm ends the protection early depends on how your particular listing was written, so read that paragraph yourself. On the keys, do not just drop them somewhere. The lockbox and any keys belong to the brokerage. Arrange the return through the office, hand them to a person or ship them with tracking, and get an email confirming receipt. Same idea with the sign and any brochure box. Small stuff, but it closes the loop cleanly. One more housekeeping item. Ask your agent to confirm the listing has been withdrawn or expired in the MLS rather than left hanging in an active status, so your next agent starts from a clean record. How days on market are handled when a home comes back varies by MLS, so have the new agent check the local rule before relisting rather than assuming it resets. Now the part I want to say gently, because it matters and nobody benefits from tiptoeing around it. A newly licensed family friend can absolutely do a good job for you. Everyone starts somewhere, and new agents often bring more attention and more hours than a busy veteran. What I would ask, plainly and without apology, is who is supervising the transaction. Every new licensee works under a supervising broker, and on something as consequential as selling your home the fair question is whether an experienced person will actually be reviewing the pricing analysis, the disclosures and the contracts. Ask directly whether their broker or a mentor will co-list with them or review the file at each milestone. A good new agent will welcome that question, because the honest answer is usually yes and it makes them look supported rather than exposed. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney, so if the release language gets complicated, have a real estate attorney glance at it. I work with sellers in Los Angeles, the South Bay and on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If you are somewhere else and want a second set of eyes locally, I am happy to introduce you to someone strong from my network. My name is Zoltan Peresztegi, and I hope Thursday goes smoothly. Zoltan

Biddy, your reasoning is better than you may realize, and as a Seniors Real Estate Specialist (SRES) I want to give you the specific reason that has not come up yet in this thread. Buying while you are still employed is genuinely easier than buying after you retire, and the reason is underwriting. Qualifying on W-2 employment income is about as simple as a mortgage file gets. Qualifying on retirement income is a different exercise. You have to document the income type, amount and frequency with a benefit statement, show proof of receipt before closing, and where the money comes out of a 401(k), IRA or similar account, the lender generally has to verify it will continue for at least three years. None of that is impossible. It is just more paperwork and more room for a file to stall. So your instinct to buy while the paychecks are still landing is the easier road, not the reckless one. A few Texas specifics worth studying now, because the tax math is different from Pennsylvania. Texas has no state income tax, which sounds like pure upside, but property taxes carry more of the funding load and Texas sits near the top of the national table on effective property tax rates. Two things soften that. First, the residence homestead exemption, which for school district taxes now shields $140,000 of appraised value after Texas voters approved an increase in November 2025. Second, once you reach age 65 there is an additional $60,000 school district exemption on top of that, plus a school tax ceiling that freezes the school portion of your bill at the level of the year you qualify, so it does not climb with rising rates unless you add improvements. You have to own and occupy the home as your principal residence to claim any of it. These amounts move with legislation, so confirm current numbers and eligibility with the county appraisal district where you land. I am a real estate professional, not a CPA. Budget honestly for insurance. It has risen meaningfully in parts of Texas and relocating buyers underestimate it. If you land in one of the fourteen first tier coastal counties, or the eastern slice of Harris County, wind and hail is often carved out of the base policy and comes through separate windstorm coverage, frequently through the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association, which generally requires a WPI-8 certificate on structures built or altered since 1988. Note that windstorm coverage does not include flood. Get a real quote on any house before you fall for it. Now the part your plan actually turns on: those two years. You have to decide what the house does while you are still in Pennsylvania. Leaving it vacant is simplest but not free, since most carriers treat an unoccupied home differently and may require a vacancy endorsement, and you carry a payment with nothing offsetting it. Placing a tenant in it produces income, but you become a long distance landlord in a state whose rules you do not know yet, and you would need the lease structured so the home is delivered vacant when you are ready to move in. Neither is wrong. Just pick one deliberately and price it into the decision now. One timing note. You asked this in June 2025 and rate and program conditions have moved since then, so re-run the numbers with a current quote. And do not let rate lock talk rush you. A lock matters in the weeks around closing, not months before you start shopping. I work with buyers and sellers in Los Angeles, the South Bay and on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, so I am not your Texas agent. What I can do is introduce you to a strong one in the market where your family lives, because a Dallas agent and a Corpus Christi agent solve very different problems. My name is Zoltan Peresztegi, SRES, and your plan sounds well considered to me. Zoltan

Jerome, the honest answer to your headline question is yes. Actively sourcing homes is part of what a buyer agent does. The specific scope of what she owes you is spelled out in the buyer agreement you signed, so pull that document out and read it, because since August 2024 an agent generally has to have a written buyer agreement in place before touring a home, which means you almost certainly have one. Now let me be straight with you, because the facts buried in your question matter far more than the headline. Your purchase is fully contingent on selling a home you co-own, you have said you could not qualify for a loan on your own, and there is no cash in the bank. In that situation the next step is not another showing. It is a written assessment from a lender. Until you know what you could qualify for after your current home sells, and what your net proceeds would actually be, every showing is guesswork, and guesswork is exhausting. Here is the mechanic that may explain your frustration. An offer contingent on the sale of a home that is not even listed yet is one of the weakest offers on a seller's table. Plenty of sellers will not entertain one at all. So the very short list of homes your agent has brought you may not be laziness. It may be the honest set of properties where that kind of offer has a chance. Ask her directly whether that is what is going on. The two tools people use to break a sale contingency are a bridge loan and a HELOC on the current home. Both are worth asking about, and both carry the same catch: they are underwritten. Bridge financing in particular usually means showing you can carry the old mortgage, the new mortgage and the bridge payment at the same time. If qualifying is the problem, that is the gate, and only a lender can tell you whether it opens. I am a real estate professional, not a lender, so get that answer from someone licensed to give it. One more thing, said plainly and with no judgment. If your daughter is on title to the home you live in, she has to sign to sell it, and the equity is not solely yours. That is not a detail you can sort out later. Sit down with her before you go any further so you both know where you stand, and if the ownership situation is at all complicated, an hour with a real estate attorney is money well spent. I am not an attorney either. As for your agent pulling you aside about your daughter, I am not going to guess what she meant by that. Ask her directly what she was raising and why. A straight question usually gets a straight answer, and if it does not, that tells you something too. Here is a concrete step you can take this week. Email your agent and ask, in writing, for the exact search criteria she is running (price range, area, bedrooms, and whether she is screening for sellers who will accept a sale contingency) and how many active listings currently match. That turns a vague frustration into a specific conversation, and if the criteria are wrong you will see it immediately. I work with buyers and sellers across Los Angeles, the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula, and contingent moves like yours are one of the most common puzzles I untangle. You did not mention where you are, so if you are outside my area I am glad to point you to a strong agent in my network. My name is Zoltan Peresztegi, and I hope this gives you a clearer order of operations. Zoltan

Hi Laura, the thread jumped straight to loan products, and I want to back up one step, because there is a question that has to be answered before any of those matter. The committed claim: confirm the house is actually in your name before you apply for anything. Inherited property very often still sits in the estate, and no lender will lend against a house you do not yet legally own. Pull the deed from your county recorder. If it still says your mother, you are not the owner in a lender's eyes, no matter what the will says. Depending on how she held title, the fix may be probate, or simpler if there was a trust, joint tenancy, or transfer on death deed. Probate can run months to over a year, so start now and work the rest in parallel. Also be clear about what the $10,000 is. A mortgage balance, an estate debt, a tax bill and a personal debt are four different problems, and estate debts generally have to be settled before the house comes to you clean. Once title is yours, here are the real options. FHA 203(k). This is the renovation mortgage that wraps the purchase or refinance and the repair money into one loan, so you are not trying to qualify for a separate second loan on bad credit. The Limited version currently caps rehabilitation costs at $75,000, up from the old $35,000, and needs no HUD consultant. The Standard version has no separate repair cap beyond your county's FHA loan limit, requires at least $5,000 in repairs, allows structural work, and requires a HUD-approved consultant. It is an owner-occupant program, so tell your lender whether you live there. FHA Title I property improvement loans. Still an active HUD program. HUD insures participating lenders against loss, and the work has to substantially protect or improve the basic livability or utility of the home. Anything above $7,500 in outstanding Title I balances has to be secured against the property. The catch is that not many lenders offer it, so you may have to call around. On credit, FHA standards are generally more forgiving than conventional, but every lender adds its own overlays. A denial from one lender is not a denial from all. Apply with at least three. The option you may not want but deserve honestly: sell as is. If what the renovation costs plus the $10,000 you owe is more than the improvements will return, selling as is to a retail buyer, not a cash offer company, can leave you with money in hand and no debt. That is not giving up. That is winning a different way. One trap if you do renovate: contractor liens. If you pay your general contractor and he does not pay his subs or suppliers, they can lien your house even though you paid. The protection: get a signed lien waiver with every payment, not just the last one, and from the subs and suppliers, not just the general contractor. Use conditional waivers when you hand over a check and unconditional ones only after the money clears. Sweat equity is real but limited. Paint, demo, cleanup and landscaping you can do yourself. Permitted electrical, plumbing and structural work generally needs licensed trades, and unpermitted work becomes a disclosure problem and a price cut when you sell. Free help exists. HUD-approved housing counselors cost little or nothing and can look at your whole picture. Find one at hud.gov or call 800-569-4287. You asked in June 2025 and these program terms have changed since, so verify current numbers with a lender. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney, a lender, or a CPA, so please get a probate or estate attorney on the title question. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a Los Angeles and South Bay real estate professional serving the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the beach cities. Your location is not listed, so if you are outside my area I am glad to refer you to a great agent. Zoltan

Hi Shanieka, straight with you about one thing first: I am not going to vouch for or against the company you named, because I have never transacted with them, and anyone here telling you they are great or terrible without having closed a deal with them is guessing at your expense. What I can give you is a test that works on any unsolicited cash buyer, plus the part of your question nobody has touched, which is that you have a manufactured home and that changes everything. The committed claim: with any cash buyer that comes to you, the single question that separates a real buyer from a wholesaler is whether they will close in their own name with their own money. And the fastest way to find out is to ask whether the contract is assignable. Here is why that question works. A wholesaler does not want your house. They want your contract. They tie the home up at a price, then sell the contract to an actual buyer at a markup, and that markup comes out of what you could have gotten. It is legal in most places when disclosed, but it means the person negotiating with you has no funds and no intention of closing. So ask directly: is this contract assignable, and will you remove the assignment language? A real buyer closing with their own funds has no reason to say no. The rest of the checklist. Verify the entity is registered with your state. Ask for current proof of funds, a bank statement or a letter from the institution, not a screenshot. Refuse any long inspection or due diligence window that lets them walk for any reason while your home sits off the market. Ask what the earnest money is and insist it is held by a title or escrow company, never by them. And have a real estate attorney or a local agent read the contract before you sign, not after. Now the manufactured home part, which could be worth real money to you. Whether your home is titled as real property or as personal property, sometimes called chattel, completely changes who is allowed to buy it. Personal property usually means it is still titled like a vehicle through your state, which narrows you to cash buyers and chattel lenders at higher rates. Real property means it sits on land you own, on a permanent foundation, with the old title retired into the real property records, and it can be sold and financed much more like a regular house. Go look for two things. The HUD Certification Label, a metal tag on the outside of the home, and the data plate, a paper sheet usually glued inside a bedroom closet, a kitchen cabinet door, or inside the electrical panel cover. Those establish that the home was built to the HUD Code. For FHA financing, the home generally has to be built on or after June 15, 1976, sit on a permanent foundation meeting HUD standards with the hitch, wheels and axles removed, and be titled as real property. Clear those and your buyer pool is far larger than one cash offer implies, and a larger pool means leverage. So before you accept anything, sit down with a local agent for one listing consultation and find out what your net would be on the open market versus this offer. That is the only way to know whether the cash number is fair. You asked in June 2025 and manufactured housing loan terms have kept changing, so confirm current requirements with a lender who does them. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney, so please get one to read any purchase contract before you sign. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a Los Angeles and South Bay real estate professional serving the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the beach cities. Your location is not listed, so if you are outside my area I am glad to refer you to an agent who handles manufactured homes. Zoltan

Hi Vanessa, this thread was answered in June 2025 and the rules have moved twice since then, so some of what you read above is out of date. Here is where it stands now. The committed claim: a true office exclusive, meaning a listing your seller instructions keep entirely out of the MLS and entirely out of public marketing, is generally permitted and simply will not appear on the public portals. What gets you in trouble is the other version, where a home is marketed publicly but withheld from the MLS. That combination is what triggers both MLS penalties and portal restrictions. Private and quiet is allowed. Advertised but hidden from cooperation is not. The mechanics. NAR's Clear Cooperation Policy is still in place. Under it, within one business day of marketing a property to the public, the listing broker has to submit it to the MLS. "Public marketing" is defined broadly and includes yard signs, flyers in a window, public facing websites, brokerage site displays, email blasts, and multi-brokerage listing sharing networks. An office exclusive is filed with the MLS but not distributed outside the listing firm, and NAR issued guidance in July 2026 confirming that if an office exclusive is marketed publicly, that same one business day clock applies. So the office exclusive is not a loophole. It is a promise not to advertise. There is also a middle option that did not exist in most markets when you asked. In March 2025 NAR adopted a policy adding "delayed marketing exempt listings," which lets a seller instruct the listing agent to hold off on IDX distribution and syndication for a period set by each individual MLS. It comes with a requirement: a signed seller disclosure documenting your informed consent to waive the benefits of immediate public marketing. If a private start appeals to you, this is usually the cleaner path, because it has a defined status and a defined end date rather than being an indefinite quiet listing. On Zillow specifically, you were right that something was happening. Zillow began enforcing Listing Access Standards in 2025 that blocked publicly marketed listings not submitted to the MLS, and a federal court upheld those standards in February 2026. Zillow then rewrote them on March 17, 2026. The current test is not "is it in the MLS." It is whether the listing is made broadly accessible to the general public with open access, which can be a public website, an app, a portal, or the MLS. Notice the flip side: if buyers have to register with the listing brokerage or call the brokerage to see the home, that fails the broadly accessible test and Zillow will not display it. A brokerage private network can be exactly the thing that keeps your home off the site. Now the part that actually decides this, and it has nothing to do with policy. Every private listing arrangement trades exposure for control. Fewer buyers see the home, fewer buyers compete, and less competition generally means a lower final number. Sellers underestimate that cost because it is invisible. You never meet the buyer who would have paid more and never knew the house existed. There are real reasons to go private, privacy, a tenant, a job situation, and if one applies to you it can be the right call. Just make the decision knowing what you are spending. Rules vary by MLS and by portal and are still changing, so have your agent show you your MLS's current written rule. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney, and the seller waiver is a real contract, so read it carefully. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a Los Angeles and South Bay real estate professional working the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the beach cities, where quiet listings come up often. Your location is not listed, so if you are outside my area I can refer you to an agent who knows your MLS rules cold. Zoltan

Hi Ava, thirteen answers in and the thread has the basics covered, so let me give you the two pieces of mechanics that almost never come up and that will actually change how this goes for you. Start with the claim I will commit to: your listing agreement is not with your agent. It is with the brokerage. Your agent's name is on it, but the contracting party is the company, and only the broker of record can release you. That single fact reroutes your whole request. Asking your agent to cancel is asking someone who does not have the authority to grant it. Put the request in writing to the managing broker or broker of record, by email so it is dated, and ask specifically for a signed release of the listing agreement. Now the piece I really want you to know. There is a difference between a withdrawal and a cancellation, and they are not interchangeable. A withdrawal pulls the home off the market and changes the MLS status, but the agreement itself usually stays in force, which means you are still bound to that brokerage for the rest of the term. A cancellation ends the agreement. When a seller asks to cancel, it is common to be offered a withdrawal instead, and plenty of sellers walk away thinking they are free when they are not. Read whatever you are handed and confirm in writing which one you are getting. Second piece, and this is the commercial one. Your days on market count follows the property, and how it behaves when you relist depends on your local MLS rules. Most MLSs require the listing to sit off market for a minimum number of days before a new listing starts back at zero, and that minimum genuinely varies. To give you a sense of the spread, California Regional MLS moved its cumulative days reset down to 30 days as of November 2025, ARMLS in Arizona requires more than 45 consecutive days off market, and some MLSs still use 90. This matters because a home that reappears carrying accumulated days on market reads as stale to buyers and invites lowball offers. Ask your next agent what your MLS requires before you cancel, because timing the cancellation can buy you a genuinely fresh start. Third, the protection period. Most listing agreements say that if a buyer the brokerage introduced during the listing goes on to buy your home within a named window after it ends, the brokerage may still be owed its fee. At cancellation, ask for the list of registered or protected buyers in writing. If nobody toured, ask them to state that the list is empty. Practical order of operations. Read your agreement first and find the term, the cancellation language, and the protection period. Send the written release request to the broker of record. Settle whether you owe anything for marketing already spent, and get that in writing too. Get the signed release and keep a copy where you can find it in a year. Only then sign with someone new. One note for anyone reading this after the fact: Ava asked in June 2025, and MLS relisting rules have kept changing since then, so confirm the current rule in your own market rather than relying on a number from a post. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney, and your agreement is a contract, so if the brokerage pushes back or you think you may owe a fee, get a real estate attorney in your state to read it. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a Los Angeles and South Bay real estate professional working the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the beach cities. Your location is not listed, so if you are outside my area, I am happy to point you to a strong listing agent through my referral network. Zoltan

Hi Robert, the thread has covered the missing paperwork, but I think you are actually dealing with two separate problems and they are getting blended together. Pull them apart and the answer gets a lot clearer. Here is the claim I will commit to: an agent's fiduciary duty means every material term, especially anything that changes what you pay or what the seller nets, has to be explained to you before you are asked to sign, not delivered by being buried in a document that shows up in your inbox. Disclosure by document is not the same thing as disclosure by conversation, and the second one is the duty. Problem one is the missing buyer agreement. Since August 17, 2024, under the NAR practice changes that bind MLS Participants, an agent working with a buyer is supposed to enter into a written buyer agreement before touring a home, and that agreement has to include a specific and conspicuous disclosure of the compensation the agent will receive or how it will be determined. Touring you through houses with nothing signed is not a small clerical slip. It skipped the exact document that was designed to tell you the number you are now discovering the hard way. Problem two is the bigger one, and it is the part I would focus on. Since that same date, offers of compensation are no longer published on the MLS. Compensation is negotiated between you and your own agent in your buyer agreement, and separately it can be requested from the seller as a concession written into your offer. Those are two different conversations, and both of them belonged to you. NAR's own consumer guidance says plainly that compensation is not set by law and is fully negotiable. So the moment your agent learned what the listing side was prepared to do, that was a phone call to you, not a line item. I am deliberately not going to tell you whether 4 percent is reasonable or what the 1 percent figure means, because your question is cut off mid-sentence and I cannot see what that number attaches to. Anyone in this thread telling you it is fine or telling you it is outrageous is guessing. What I would actually do, in order. Do not sign anything else until it is explained. Send your agent a written request, email so it is dated, asking for a plain-English breakdown of every dollar that moves in this transaction and who pays it. Ask for copies of every form you have signed and every form he has signed on your behalf. Say clearly that the amounts are negotiable and that you want to renegotiate before you sign. If the answer is vague, go to his brokerage's managing broker, who supervises him and can fix it. If that goes nowhere and you believe there was a license law violation, your state real estate licensing commission takes consumer complaints. If he is a REALTOR member, his local REALTOR association handles ethics complaints separately. One note for anyone reading this later: you asked in May 2025, and compensation practice has kept moving since then, so verify the current forms with your own agent. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney, so if real money is on the line here, an hour with a real estate attorney in your state is worth it. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a Los Angeles and South Bay real estate professional serving the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the surrounding beach cities. Your location is not listed, so if you are outside my area and want a second agent to review the paperwork with you, I am glad to refer you to someone solid in your market. Zoltan

Kris, if there is equity in your house, a normal sale on the open market almost always nets more than a fast cash offer. What decides whether that is still possible is not how motivated you are. It is how many days remain before the scheduled foreclosure sale date. So the first thing to do today is get that exact date and the exact figure to bring the loan current, both in writing from your servicer. The thread's advice about pricing right and moving fast is good. I want to add the options that sit ahead of a quick sale, because some may still be open and are worth checking before you accept a discount. Call the loss mitigation department at your servicer, not the regular collections line, and ask for three things in writing: the scheduled sale date if one exists, a reinstatement quote good through a specific date, and a full payoff quote. Reinstatement is the amount that brings the loan current, missed payments plus fees, and paying it generally stops the process. People assume they must pay the whole loan off. They do not. Sometimes the reinstatement figure is small enough that family, a retirement loan, or selling a vehicle covers it. Ask that same department about a repayment plan, which spreads the arrears across future payments, and about forbearance, which pauses or reduces payments for a set stretch. Federal servicing rules also generally bar a servicer from making the first foreclosure notice or filing until the loan is more than 120 days delinquent, so if you are early in this, you may have more runway than you think. Then call a HUD counselor. HUD approved agencies provide foreclosure prevention counseling free of charge, review your numbers, tell you which loss mitigation options you qualify for, and help you assemble the application. They negotiate with servicers every day and they are not selling you anything. HUD has a live operator line at 800-569-4287 and a locator at answers.hud.gov/housingcounseling. Programs have changed since this question was posted, and a counselor will know what is current. Your remaining paths, in rough order of what they cost you: reinstate or work out a plan and keep the house; list and sell on the open market before the sale date, which is where your equity lives; a short sale if you owe more than it is worth, which needs lender approval; and a deed in lieu as a last resort, where you hand the property back by agreement. The one to avoid is the auction, because it is run to satisfy the debt, not to get you a good price. Any surplus above the debt and costs is legally yours, but a marketed sale routinely brings in far more. One warning, because this targets people in exactly your position. In most places the first foreclosure filing becomes public record, so the mail and calls will start. Never sign your deed over to anyone promising to take over payments or hold title while you rent it back. The mortgage stays in your name, so if they stop paying you lose the house and still owe the debt. Anyone rushing you to sign without letting you read it is the tell. Report those outfits to the CFPB, the FTC, or your state attorney general. Some states have a redemption period after the sale and some have none. That, and your state's timeline, is a question for a local real estate attorney. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney or a lender. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional based in Los Angeles, working the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Tell me your city and I will connect you with an agent from my network who handles pre-foreclosure sales. This is survivable, Kris, and you likely have more options than you think. Make the servicer call and the counselor call today. Zoltan

Angela, since you are days from closing, deal with the title vesting first, before the side agreement. You said you signed a joint tenancy agreement. Joint tenancy carries a right of survivorship, which means if one of you dies, your share passes automatically to the surviving friend. It overrides your will and any co-ownership agreement you sign later. For two friends buying together, that is very often not what either of you actually intends, and it is far easier to change before the deed records than after. The thread is right that you want the agreement in writing. I just want you to fix the deed first, because that is the piece with a deadline on it. The alternative to look at is tenancy in common. Under tenancy in common there is no survivorship. Each of you owns a defined share, the shares can be unequal to match unequal down payments, and when one of you dies that share goes into your estate and passes under your will to whoever you choose. Most unmarried co-buyers who think it through end up here. Call your escrow or closing officer and title company today, ask what vesting options your state offers and what the deed currently says, and have an attorney confirm which one fits before you sign closing documents. Then the agreement itself. What you are describing is real and normal, usually called a co-ownership agreement or a cohabitation agreement. It should cover, at minimum: Who contributed what to the down payment and closing costs, and how unequal contributions are credited when you sell. Who pays what monthly, including mortgage, taxes, insurance, HOA, utilities, and a reserve for repairs. Who decides on repairs and improvements, above what dollar amount you both must agree, and how that spending is credited against equity, so one of you paying for a new roof is not just a gift. What happens if one of you cannot pay for a few months, including whether the other covers it as a loan with interest. How the property is valued if one of you wants out, for example by averaging two appraisals at that time. A buyout right with an actual deadline, so neither of you is held hostage. And a full exit section for the predictable events: death, disability, marriage, a job relocation, or a change of heart. Here is why this matters. If two co-owners cannot agree and there is no written agreement, the default remedy is a partition action. In plain terms, either owner can ask a court to divide the property, and because you cannot cut a house in half, the court can order it sold and split the proceeds. A court sale on someone else's timeline is exactly the outcome your agreement exists to prevent. You mentioned other additions. Some co-buyers hold title in an LLC with an operating agreement that handles all of this. Honestly, that one can complicate residential financing and carries tax consequences, so it is a question for your lender, your attorney, and a CPA, not a recommendation from me, and not something to attempt this week. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney and not a CPA. Please call a real estate attorney in your state today, before you sign closing documents. An hour of their time now is the cheapest part of this entire purchase. Also, since this question stays online: if the closing date has passed, the vesting conversation is still worth having, it just becomes a deed change rather than a form change, so ask the attorney about cost and tax consequences first. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional based in Los Angeles, working the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If you are buying somewhere else and need a referral to a strong local agent or a co-ownership savvy attorney, I am glad to connect you with someone from my network. Zoltan

Hi David, your first phone call is not to an agent and it is not to the listing agent on that house. It is to a lender. A preapproval is free, it usually takes a day or two once you send documents, and it sets every decision that comes after it. Do that first and the rest of this gets simple. The thread already told you to get preapproved, which is right. What it did not give you is the order and the reason for each step, so here is the sequence I would follow. Step one, the lender. Talk to two or three, at least one of them a local one, and ask each for a written preapproval. What you are buying with that hour is not the price. It is the monthly number. Ask the loan officer to break out principal, interest, property taxes, homeowners insurance, mortgage insurance if it applies, and any HOA dues, so you see the whole payment rather than the loan amount. People get surprised by that gap constantly. While you are there, ask about your debt to income ratio, which is the main thing that decides how much you can borrow. In plain language, it is your total monthly debt payments divided by your gross monthly income. Two things follow from that. Paying down a car loan or a credit card with a big minimum payment can raise your buying power more than saving another thousand dollars, because it lowers the top of the fraction every single month. And do not open new credit or finance furniture while you are in process, because that quietly moves the same number the wrong way. Step two, and this is the one almost nobody mentions. Call a HUD approved housing counseling agency. HUD certified counselors give independent advice on exactly what you are asking, and the service is free or very low cost. They are not selling you a loan, which is the point. HUD has a live operator line at 800-569-4287 to find a participating agency near you, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a search tool as well. A counselor will look at your credit, your budget, and your actual numbers, and will know the first time buyer and down payment assistance programs in your city and state, which change and are easy to miss. Step three, the agent. Now interview one or two, with your preapproval in hand, and pick the person who explains rather than pushes. Step four, the house. Yes, in that order. One term to know before you write an offer. Earnest money is the good faith deposit you put up when your offer is accepted. It goes into escrow, not into the seller's pocket, and it is credited back to you at closing. It is not an extra fee on top of your down payment. It becomes at risk mainly if you walk away outside the protections your contract gives you, which is why the inspection, appraisal, and financing contingencies matter. Now the gentle part. The specific house you found may well be gone by the time you are ready, and that is genuinely fine. You are not building toward one address, you are building the ability to buy any address that fits. The next one will come. I am a real estate professional, not a lender, so let the loan officer confirm your numbers in writing. Also worth saying, since questions like yours stay online a long time: rates and program details have moved since this was posted, so verify anything you read against today. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional based in Los Angeles, working the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If you are buying somewhere else, tell me the city and I will connect you with someone strong from my network. Make the lender call this week, David. Zoltan

Hi Connie, before you accept that you are stuck, get clear on which of two very different problems you actually have. What a seller must disclose is a material fact about the property. A one-time argument between two people is generally not the same thing as a defect in the land. An ongoing dispute over where the line runs, or over access, absolutely is. Those two situations have different disclosure consequences and, more importantly, only one of them is permanently fixable. The thread's instinct to disclose broadly and stay safe is fine. But I think your agent may be collapsing two different problems into one, and that is what is costing you. Here is the line. If the neighbors are simply unpleasant, and what happened was that they got in someone's face and the buyer withdrew, that lands closer to a stigma or psychological issue than to a property defect. Those rules are set by state statute and they vary enormously. Some states expressly say psychologically impacting events are not material facts a seller has to volunteer. Some impose narrow time windows. Some rely on general material fact principles plus a duty not to misrepresent if a buyer asks directly. There is no national rule and no universal clock that makes it expire after a set number of months, which is the honest answer to your timeframe question. But if there is a real dispute about the boundary, an encroaching fence, a claimed easement, or a driveway or path someone has been using across your lot long enough to claim a right to it, that is a title and property matter. It attaches to the land, not to a personality, and in most places it is disclosable and it will also surface in title work whether you disclose it or not. So the productive move is to find out which one you have, and there are two documents that tell you. One, order a current boundary survey from a licensed surveyor, with the corners staked. That establishes where the line actually is and whether anything, including that fence, sits on the wrong side of it. Two, pull the recorded documents for your parcel and the adjoining ones from the county recorder: your deed, the plat or subdivision map, and any recorded easements or agreements. A title company can also run a preliminary title report for you. If those come back clean, you have a people problem, and you handle it through your disclosure statement in whatever way your state actually requires, priced accordingly. If they come back showing an encroachment or a boundary conflict, you now have something you can permanently solve: move the fence, get a recorded boundary line agreement, correct the description, or in a stubborn case quiet the title. Once it is resolved and recorded, it stops being a cloud. That is worth far more than waiting out a timeframe that may not exist. One more practical thought. Handing a buyer the survey and the recorded documents up front turns an unknown into a known and priced item. Vague trouble scares buyers off. Documented and resolved trouble does not. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney, and disclosure duties on land are genuinely state specific and get amended, so take this to your agent's broker of record and to a local real estate attorney and ask them for the actual rule in your state, in writing. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional based in Los Angeles, working the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If your lot is elsewhere, I am glad to connect you with an agent from my network who handles land and knows the local surveyors worth calling. Start with the survey, Connie. Zoltan

Hi Sarah, yes. You can sign an agreement that covers two to four specific houses and nothing more, and you are not asking for a special favor. The National Association of REALTORS published guidance to agents saying its policy does not dictate the term of a written buyer agreement, and the examples it gives are one day, one month, one house, one zip code. A two property, 30 day agreement sits squarely inside the rules. The thread has already covered why you are being asked to sign at all, which is the requirement that took effect on August 17, 2024 for agents who participate in an MLS, before touring a home in person or on a live virtual walkthrough. So let me skip that and give you the four things to actually ask for, in order. First, make it property specific. Ask the agent to write the street addresses into the agreement so it covers those homes and nothing else. If you want to see a fifth house next week, you sign again. That is a thirty second conversation, not a problem. Second, if the agent prefers a date range to a list of addresses, cap the term. Ask for a few days, or 30 day, instead of six months. Both of you can see the end date on the page. Third, ask for it to be non-exclusive. Exclusive means that agent is your only agent for the term. Non-exclusive lets you tour with a second agent the same week, which is exactly the comparison you said you want to run. This one matters more than the length. Fourth, read the compensation line and the carryover clause. Under the current rules the compensation has to be a specific, objectively ascertainable number rather than open ended language, and it has to say plainly that commissions are not set by law and are negotiable. The carryover clause, sometimes called a protection period, says that if you buy a home that agent showed you within some window after the agreement ends, compensation may still be owed. That is not unfair in principle, but read it and negotiate the window. Mechanically, you are allowed to strike a printed term, write in the one you want, and initial it, as long as the agent and their office agree and initial too. Those printed terms are defaults, not law. Also just ask the agent directly what forms their brokerage offers, because many state associations and firms now publish a short form or single property version built for buyers in exactly your position, and some call it a showing agreement. If they have one, this takes two minutes. Now the part you did not quite ask but clearly meant. How an agent answers a request for a short, property specific, non-exclusive agreement is itself the information you were looking for. Someone confident says yes without flinching, because they expect the tour to earn the longer commitment. Someone who insists on six months exclusive before showing you a single house is telling you how they win clients, and it is not by service. Two caveats. Forms, agency rules, and what a brokerage will allow are set state by state, so I am a real estate professional and not an attorney, and the agent should walk you through their state's form line by line. And note that forms have been revised more than once since these rules first landed, so use the current version, not a copy someone saved a year ago. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional based in Los Angeles, working the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If you are house hunting somewhere else, I am glad to connect you with an agent from my network who will write you a short agreement without a fight. Either way, Sarah, ask for it before you get in the car. Zoltan

Michele, whether you can split this is not your decision, and it is not your surveyor's either. It is decided by your county's land development code, and one phone call to your county planning and zoning department, with your parcel number in hand, will answer it in about fifteen minutes. Make that call before you spend a dollar on anything else. Here is exactly what to ask, in this order. What is the current zoning on this parcel and what is the minimum lot size in that district. Five acres split in half gives you two parcels of two and a half acres, and the only question that matters is whether that clears the minimum where you are. Some rural districts require five or ten acres per lot, and the conversation ends right there. Is this parcel platted or unplatted. If it sits inside a recorded subdivision plat, changing the lines is usually a replat, which is heavier than a simple lot split. If it is unplatted acreage, most Florida counties handle it as a lot split application: a current survey by a Florida licensed land surveyor showing the parent parcel and the proposed division, filed with the county application form. Would each resulting parcel have its own legal road frontage and access. A back parcel reached only across the front one is a much harder approval and usually needs a recorded easement at minimum. Can each house be served by its own water and septic. In Florida the septic tank and drainfield must sit at least 75 feet from a private drinking water well, and that separation has to hold on each new parcel independently, not across the old five acres. If one house is on a well that would end up on the other parcel, that is the first problem to solve. Ask your county property appraiser separately whether this parcel carries an agricultural classification under Florida's greenbelt law, Section 193.461. That classification can mean a substantially lower assessment, it requires bona fide commercial agricultural use, and it is reviewed annually. I will not tell you what a split would do to yours, because that depends on your use and your appraiser. Ask them directly and get it in writing. If the numbers do not work you are not necessarily finished. You can apply for a variance, a formal request to deviate from a specific requirement of the code. Be realistic about it. Variances are discretionary, they usually involve a public hearing, and they are slow. Now the part I would want someone to say to me. The split may not be your actual problem. Five acres with a main house and a second full house is not an unsellable oddity. It is a product with real buyers: multigenerational families who want parents close but not under the same roof, a buyer who wants the second house to carry part of the payment, someone who needs a caretaker's place. Marketed as a single-family home with an outbuilding, those buyers see nothing. Marketed as a compound, or a main house plus a guest house with income, and priced against what those buyers compare it to rather than ordinary single-family comps, it can move. Before you spend months on surveys, applications and hearings, have an agent who really knows acreage in your county reprice and reposition it. That test is fast, and the split will still be there if it fails. Florida county codes and agricultural rules are local and have kept changing since you posted this in May 2025, so verify all of the above with your own county rather than any general answer online, including mine. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney or a surveyor, and if this involves easements or a variance hearing you will want a Florida real estate attorney. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I work in Los Angeles and the South Bay, including the Palos Verdes Peninsula, so I am not your local agent for this. Tell me your county and I will connect you with a Florida agent in my network who handles acreage and knows that planning department by name. Zoltan

Great question, and you are not the only one losing sleep over this line. Signing a buyer representation agreement does not mean you are automatically writing a check to your agent out of pocket. Let me walk you through what it actually does. Two things changed the game. The NAR settlement rules kicked in back in August 2024, and here in California a state law now requires that any agent working with you as a buyer has a signed written agreement in place before they write your offer. In California that form is the C.A.R. Buyer Representation and Broker Compensation Agreement, the BRBC. It spells out three things: how long you and your agent are working together, whether it is exclusive, and the most your agent can be paid. Here is the part that matters for your worry. The number in that agreement is a ceiling, not a guaranteed bill you owe. You can still ask the seller to cover it. When we write your offer, we include a term asking the seller to pay your agent, and plenty of sellers still say yes, especially in this market. If the seller agrees to pay the full amount, you owe nothing extra. If the seller only offers part of it, you would cover the gap, and that gets put in front of you in writing before you are locked in, so there are no surprises at the closing table. A few practical moves. The rate and the length are both negotiable, so if you are nervous, ask for a shorter term or even an agreement tied to just one property while you get comfortable. And ask your agent to walk you through exactly what happens in three scenarios: seller pays the full amount, seller pays part, seller pays nothing. A good agent will do that without blinking. One honest caveat: I am a real estate professional, not an attorney, so for the exact contract language have your agent or a real estate attorney read the form with you line by line before you sign. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a Realtor working the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the South Bay in Los Angeles County. If you are here in the South Bay or greater LA, I am happy to sit down and go through the BRBC with you so it actually makes sense. If you are elsewhere in California or out of state, I can connect you with a trusted agent in my network who will do the same. Zoltan

Lesandra, here is the distinction nobody drew for you, and it is the whole answer. A seller can ask you to get a second opinion from a lender they trust, and can even make accepting your offer contingent on producing that second pre-approval letter. A seller cannot make you actually borrow the money from that lender. Those are two different things and the listing agent is blurring them. The reason is simple. Your loan is a contract between you and the lender. You sign it, the seller does not. Choosing who you borrow from, for thirty years, is yours. There is a related federal rule worth knowing because it shows which way the law leans. Under RESPA, on a home purchased with a federally related mortgage, a seller cannot require you, as a condition of selling, to buy title insurance from a particular title company, and a seller who does is liable to the buyer for three times the title insurance charges. Congress wrote that because sellers were steering buyers into their own preferred vendors. That section does not cover lenders, so I will not tell you a statute makes her demand illegal, but the principle is clear and your right to choose your own lender is real. Now the question nobody asked, and the one I would ask first. Why that lender specifically? If the listing agent, her brokerage, or an owner of her brokerage has a financial interest in the lender she is pushing, that is an affiliated business arrangement, and RESPA requires that you be given an Affiliated Business Arrangement Disclosure Statement before the referral, stating the nature of the relationship and the estimated charges. The same rules say the person making the referral generally may not require you to use that provider. So put it in writing to your agent: please ask the listing agent whether she, her brokerage, or any owner of her brokerage has a financial interest in the lender she is requiring, and if so, provide the affiliated business arrangement disclosure. That one sentence changes the tone of the conversation very quickly. Practically, if you want the house, do this. Agree to the courtesy pre-qualification with their lender, in writing, on the condition that it is for verification only and that you keep the right to close with your own lender. That gives the seller the comfort they say they want and costs you almost nothing. On the credit hit, the honest version: a mortgage pre-approval is normally a hard inquiry, but the scoring models are built for rate shopping. Newer FICO versions treat mortgage inquiries made within a 45 day window as a single inquiry, older FICO versions use 14 days, and VantageScore uses a 14 day rolling window. Since you do not know which model gets pulled, keep all your mortgage shopping inside about two weeks and you are safe under every one of them. I will not give you a point number, because nobody can honestly predict that for your file. Last thing. The pattern you describe, escalating demands plus financial statements plus a named lender after she has already seen a valid approval, is what makes experienced agents suspect steering. You are allowed to push back in writing through your own agent, and your agent should be doing that pushing for you. I am a real estate professional, not a lender or an attorney, so if the demand shows up as an actual contract term, have a real estate attorney in your state read it before you sign. Rates, lender overlays and pre-approval practices have also moved since you posted this in April 2025, so work from a current pre-approval rather than an older one. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I represent buyers and sellers across Los Angeles and the South Bay, including the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If you are in my area I am glad to read the counter with you, and if you are elsewhere, tell me your city and I will connect you with an agent in my network who will hold that line for you. Zoltan

Kathy, yes, and here is why. A $3,000 house is almost never cheap because of the house. It is cheap because of what is attached to it. The purchase price is usually the smallest number in the whole transaction, and the documents you bring to the table matter far less than what you find out before you get to the table. Things that can follow the property to you include unpaid back property taxes, water and sewer arrears, and code enforcement liens with fines that in many cities keep accruing daily until the violation is corrected. Demolition and repair costs a city has already incurred can be assessed against the property and stay with the land. In some places a code enforcement lien held by a city or county survives even a tax deed, which means a new owner can end up responsible for violations they had nothing to do with. And if there is an open order to condemn or demolish the structure, that obligation can land on you, at your cost, after you own it. Here are the two steps I would not skip, in this order. First, order a title search and buy an owner's title insurance policy even on a $3,000 purchase. Yes, the policy costs a meaningful fraction of the price. It is still trivial next to inheriting a lien you did not know about. Have the search done through a title company or a real estate attorney, and read what comes back, especially anything showing municipal liens. If your area uses escrow or closing agents, use one. Do not do a cash handoff and a handwritten deed at a kitchen table. Second, and this is the step people skip, call the city or county yourself with the address and parcel number in hand, before you sign anything. Call code enforcement and the building department separately. Ask these exact questions. Are there open code violations or accrued fines on this address. Is there an open condemnation, unsafe structure, or demolition order. Is the structure legally habitable or has it been declared uninhabitable. What permits and inspections would be required to legally reoccupy it. Is there an unpaid water or sewer balance. Write down who you spoke with and when. That second call matters because plenty of code violations are tracked at city hall and never recorded at the county, so they can be invisible on a title report. The search and the phone call catch different problems. You need both. Now the part I want to say gently. Buying from a friend makes people skip all of this, and that is exactly backwards. Your friend is not hiding anything from you. Your friend almost certainly does not know what is attached either, because none of this surfaces until someone goes looking. The diligence protects the friendship as much as it protects you. If it comes back clean, you have lost a week. If it does not, you both just avoided something ugly. This is also the rare case where I will tell you to spend money on a real estate attorney rather than an agent. At this price no agent can afford to work the file properly, and an hour or two of attorney time is a large fraction of the purchase price but a very small fraction of the risk. Have them handle the deed, the title work and the closing. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney, and the rules on liens, condemnation and vacant property enforcement are state and city specific and have kept changing since you posted this in April 2025, so get local counsel rather than relying on any general answer online including mine. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional working across Los Angeles and the South Bay, including the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If the house is near me I will point you to the right people, and if it is in another state, tell me the city and I will connect you with an agent in my network who can recommend a local real estate attorney. Please make the code enforcement call first. Zoltan

Abby, the honest answer is that they are calling you because a buildable infill lot inside a subdivision that is already finished is one of the scarcest things in residential development, and it is usually worth more to a builder than the raw land comparables suggest. The streets are in, the utilities are in the ground, and the neighborhood value is already proven. A builder can put a house on it and sell into a known market without buying twenty acres and waiting five years. That scarcity, not the dirt, is what the calls are about. The other reason someone calls is simpler. A neighbor may want to control what gets built next to them, and that motive can be worth real money too. And no, you are not imagining the other thing. Cold callers on land almost always open well below value. It costs them nothing to try a low number on an owner who has never had the lot appraised. Before you respond to any of them, find out what you actually have. These are the things that set the value. Is it a legally separate parcel with its own parcel number and its own legal description, or is it simply extra yard inside your existing parcel? If it is not already separate, someone has to split it, and that is a county or city approval, not a handshake. Does it meet current rules on its own? Minimum lot size, minimum width and frontage, and the setback requirements in your zoning district all have to work for a house plus a driveway to fit. A lot that was legal when the subdivision was platted is not automatically legal to build on today. Are water, sewer and power already stubbed to the lot line? If there is no sewer, the lot needs a percolation test to prove the soil will accept a septic system, and a failed perc test can take a lot from buildable to nearly worthless. How does it get access? A lot with real street frontage is worth more than a flag lot, meaning a narrow driveway strip running back to a buildable area behind other homes. Flag lots often carry extra restrictions and they appraise lower. Does anything cross it? A utility easement, a drainage easement or a shared access easement can sit exactly where the house would go. A title search will show you what is recorded against it. The concrete instruction is this: get your own number before you give anyone else one. A local agent who handles land, or an appraiser who does vacant land work, can tell you what the lot is worth to a builder rather than what it is worth to a caller with a script. That opinion changes every conversation you have afterward. One more thing worth checking. Ask your county assessor whether the lot is currently assessed as its own parcel or lumped in with your home, because selling it or splitting it can change your assessment, and depending on where you live it can also affect any homestead or owner-occupied benefit you receive. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney or a CPA, so run the tax side past your own CPA before you sign anything. Land sale conditions and construction lending have also shifted since you posted this in April 2025, so get a current opinion of value rather than an old one. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional serving Los Angeles and the South Bay, including the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If your lot is anywhere in my area I am glad to look at it with you, and if it is not, tell me the city and I will connect you with someone strong in my network who works with land there. Do not sell it off a phone call. Zoltan

D, there is no such thing as a standard six month buyer agreement term. The duration is a blank line on the form. Whoever fills in that blank decides, and that is a negotiation between you and the agent, not a rule handed down from above. Being told six months is "standard" is a sales habit, not a requirement. You were right to push back, and you are not stuck. Here is the part almost nobody explains. Your agreement is with the brokerage, not with the individual agent. That single fact tells you who to call. Do not keep negotiating with the agent who signed you up, because she has a direct financial interest in keeping you under contract. Go over her head to the office manager, managing officer or designated officer at her brokerage, and ask in writing for a mutual release. Keep the request short and unemotional. Something like this: I signed a buyer representation agreement on this date, I no longer wish to proceed, and I am requesting a mutual written release with no protection period and no fees owed. Most managers sign it. An unhappy buyer who does not want to work with the firm is worth nothing to them, and a complaint to the state licensing body or the local association is worth considerably less than nothing. Please do not simply go quiet and start touring with someone new. That is where people get hurt. There is a concept called procuring cause, which the National Association of Realtors describes as the uninterrupted series of causal events that results in a successful transaction. If the first agent showed you homes, sent you listings, or introduced you to the property you eventually buy, she and her brokerage can argue they earned the fee, and you land in the middle of a dispute between two firms over one commission. A signed release ends that argument before it can start, so get it before you tour with anyone else. Two things for next time. First, write in the end date yourself before you sign. If you only want help until school is out, put that date on the form and initial it. Second, you can narrow the agreement instead of just shortening it. It can be limited to a specific property, a short list of properties, or a defined area and price range, so the agent is only protected on what she actually shows you. An agent who will not discuss either option is telling you something useful about how she will negotiate on your behalf later. Some context that surprises people. Since August 17, 2024, agents who participate in an MLS have been required to have a written agreement with a buyer before touring a home, and that agreement has to state the compensation clearly. So signing something is now normal and expected. What is not normal is being told the terms are fixed. Both the term and the compensation are negotiable. These rules and the forms built on them have kept changing since you asked this in April 2025, so ask any new agent to walk you through their current version line by line. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney, so if the brokerage refuses to release you or claims a fee is owed, have a real estate attorney in your state read the actual agreement. An hour of their time will settle it. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I work with buyers and sellers across Los Angeles and the South Bay, including the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If you are near here I am glad to help directly. If you are somewhere else, tell me your city and I will connect you with a strong agent in my network who will write your end date on the form without the speech about what is standard. Zoltan

Maggie, here is the test that actually settles this: could you fire her? Not would you have to, but could you. Month three, deal going sideways, could you sit across from her and say this is not working and I am hiring someone else. If the honest answer is no, do not hire her. Everything else is secondary to that. The thread is already full of good advice about interviewing her like any other agent, so let me give you the move nobody has raised. Ask her to refer you to a colleague. This is normal, agents do it constantly, and it is not an insult. The referring agent is typically paid a referral fee out of the receiving agent's commission, paid brokerage to brokerage, so your friend gets compensated for the introduction. You get an agent you can be completely blunt with. And the friendship never has to survive a negotiation. You can say it almost exactly like this: "I value you too much to put you in the middle of my biggest financial decision. Would you refer me to someone you trust and take a referral fee?" A professional hears that as a compliment, because you are trusting her judgment about who is good. If she reacts badly to it, you just learned something useful for free. There is a second reason this matters that people rarely say out loud. Your agent owes you a fiduciary duty, and to do the job properly she has to hold confidential information about you. She will know your real maximum, not the number you say in front of the seller. She will see your income, your debt, your credit. If you are buying with a partner, she will hear the arguments about budget. If a divorce, a job loss or a health situation is driving the move, she will know that too. Some people are fine with a close friend carrying all of that. Plenty are not, and they do not find out which they are until she is already deep in it. There is also dual agency. If your friend ends up representing both you and the seller on a home, her ability to advocate for you is limited in most states, and a few do not allow it at all. That is a hard conversation with a stranger. With a friend it can curdle into a grievance. If after all that you still want to hire her, screen her the way you would screen anyone. The one question that separates working practitioners from casual ones: how many transactions did you close in the last twelve months, and how many of those were buyers in my price range and my area? A part time agent with three closings a year is a different risk than a full time agent with thirty, no matter how much you like her. Low production is not a character flaw. It just means fewer repetitions on inspections, appraisals, multiple offers and repair negotiations, and repetitions are most of what you are paying for. And if you hire her, set the ground rules on day one, out loud, before anything is at stake. We will be blunt with each other. If either of us wants out, we say so and stay friends. Naming it in advance is most of what makes it survivable. One note since you asked this in April 2025. Agency and compensation practice has shifted since, including the now near universal written buyer agreement agents put in place before touring homes. Read whatever you sign, and check the term length and how it ends. Friend or not, that is a contract with her firm. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney, and referral fee and agency rules vary by state, so confirm the specifics with a licensed agent where you live. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I work with buyers and sellers across Los Angeles, the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. I do not know where you are buying, so I am not the right person to be your agent. If you want a name I trust in your market, I am glad to connect you with someone strong from my referral network. Zoltan

Angela, here is the mechanical answer nobody usually gives you up front: you cannot buy a HUD home directly. Every bid has to be submitted for you by a real estate professional whose brokerage is registered with HUD and holds a NAID, which stands for Name Address Identifier. Bids go in through the official government site, HUDHomeStore.gov. That is the whole gate. Once you are past it, the rest is straightforward. The thread already covers getting preapproved and finding an agent, so let me walk you through the actual sequence. First, get a preapproval letter from a lender. HUD wants proof of financing or funds along with the bid, and you will not get far without it. Do this before you fall in love with a listing. Second, find an agent registered with HUD. Not every agent is. Call two or three local offices and ask flat out: does your brokerage have an active NAID for submitting HUD bids? It costs nothing to ask, and it keeps you from starting with someone who cannot place a bid for you. Third, search HUDHomeStore.gov. That is the official site where HUD publishes its foreclosed inventory, and most of those homes also appear on the local MLS. Be careful with lookalike sites that charge a subscription for the same public listings. The government site does not charge you. Fourth, understand the owner occupant priority, because this is the part that helps you most. HUD gives buyers who will live in the home a head start before investors can bid at all. Under HUD's current policy, that exclusive listing period is 15 days for properties marketed as insured or insured with escrow, and five days for properties marketed as uninsured. During that window only owner occupants, HUD approved nonprofits and government entities may bid. To count as an owner occupant you have to intend to live there as your primary residence for at least 12 months, and you cannot have bought another HUD home as an owner occupant in the previous 24 months. After that window closes, the listing opens to every bidder, investors included. So move quickly when the right one appears. Fifth, plan for condition. HUD sells as is and will not make repairs. Get your own inspection anyway. If the home needs work, the tool built for exactly this is the FHA 203(k) rehabilitation loan, which finances the purchase and the repairs in a single loan. The Limited 203(k) currently allows up to $75,000 in rehab costs for non structural work. The Standard 203(k) handles larger and structural projects, subject to the FHA loan limit in your county. Two programs worth asking about while you are at it. Good Neighbor Next Door. If you are a full time pre K through 12 teacher, law enforcement officer, firefighter or EMT, HUD sells certain homes in designated revitalization areas at 50 percent off the list price. The discount is a silent second mortgage with no interest and no monthly payment, forgiven entirely after you live there 36 months. Those homes post for seven days, and when more than one qualified buyer wants the same one it goes to a random lottery. You still bid through a HUD registered agent. Dollar Homes. You will read about HUD homes selling for $1. Those go to local government agencies, not to individuals, so do not spend time chasing them. What you can do is call your city or county housing department and ask what they have rehabbed and are reselling to income qualified families. You asked this in 2025 and HUD changed its listing periods that same year, so have your agent confirm the current bid windows and program terms on HUDHomeStore.gov before you rely on the numbers above. I am a real estate professional, not a lender, so let a loan officer tell you what you qualify for. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I work with buyers across Los Angeles, the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. I do not know where you are looking, so I am not going to offer to be your agent. Tell me your city and I am glad to connect you with a strong local agent from my network who handles HUD bids. Zoltan

Mike, $360,000 against a $395,000 list is about 8.9 percent under ask. That is a negotiating position, not an insult, and the correct response is always a counter. Never silence, never a flat rejection. The thread already covers "counter and do not take it personally," so here are four tools I do not see anyone using yet. Run a seller net sheet at both numbers before you respond. Ask your agent for one at $395,000 and one at $360,000, with commission, transfer costs, title and closing fees, prorated property taxes and any loan payoff included. Compare the two take home figures, not the two headline prices. Then add what another 60 days on market costs you in interest, taxes, insurance and utilities. Sellers routinely discover the real gap is closer to $20,000 than $35,000, and that changes how hard you want to fight over it. Do not reflexively split the difference. Countering at $377,500 feels fair, but it anchors the midpoint as the new reference point, and now the buyer negotiates down from there instead of up from $360,000. If your true number is $380,000, counter at $388,000 or $390,000 with a reason attached, not at a number pulled out of the middle. Counter on terms, not only on price. Price is the one variable buyers defend hardest. Terms are often cheap for them and valuable to you, or the reverse, which is where deals get made. Things worth trading: a shorter inspection contingency window a larger earnest money deposit a faster close, or a rent back if you need time to move a cap on repair requests, or an as is response with a credit an appraisal gap clause where the buyer agrees to cover a shortfall up to a stated amount And the lever most sellers never consider: offer a rate buydown credit instead of cutting the price. In a seller funded temporary buydown, a lump sum goes into an escrow account at closing and the servicer draws from it each month to subsidize the buyer's payment for the first year or two. The note rate itself does not change. The dollar cost to you is often less than an equivalent price reduction, and it moves the buyer's monthly payment far more than a few thousand off the sale price ever will. Have your agent and the buyer's loan officer price it out and put the actual numbers side by side. The single most important input into how hard you counter is days on market. One week in with heavy showing traffic, counter firmly, close to ask. Sixty or ninety days in on a waterfront home in northeast Indianapolis with thin traffic and no competing offer, and this buyer may be your market telling you something. Ask your agent specifically for the absorption rate on comparable waterfront homes in your area, meaning how many months of supply are sitting. That number should drive your counter more than your original hopes for the price did. One correction worth making since it comes up: escalation clauses are a buyer tool for multiple offer situations, not a seller tool. You cannot ask a single buyer to escalate against nobody. What you can do, if a second offer shows up, is issue a multiple counter offer to both. You asked this in April 2025. Rates and local conditions have moved since, so the buydown math and the depth of your buyer pool both need a fresh look with today's numbers before you act on any of this. I am a real estate professional, not a lender, so have a licensed loan officer price any buydown before you put it in writing. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I sell in Los Angeles, the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Indiana is not my market and I am not pitching to take your listing. If you want a second opinion from someone strong in northeast Indianapolis, I am glad to connect you with an agent from my referral network. Zoltan

Daw6, you are not in trouble. There is no requirement to notify a lender that you are selling, and if your father finished paying the mortgage off, there is no lender left to notify. The thread already covers the reassurance, so let me give you the one thing that actually can bite you here. Paying a loan off does not automatically clear it from the public record. The loan is the debt. The recorded document is the lien, and those are two different things. When the debt is satisfied, the lender is supposed to record a release of lien: a Satisfaction of Mortgage in states that use mortgages, or a Deed of Reconveyance signed by the trustee in states that use a deed of trust. Sometimes that never happens. The lender fails to file it, or the servicer changed hands mid stream, or it was recorded with an error in the legal description. Years later the county records still show an open lien against a loan nobody owes a dime on. It is one of the most common and most preventable title defects in residential real estate, and it surfaces at exactly one moment: when you sell. Checking is free or close to it. Go to the county recorder or register of deeds for the county the property sits in, and pull the recorded documents on that parcel. Most counties have this searchable online now. You are looking for a recorded satisfaction, release or reconveyance that references the original mortgage or deed of trust by its recording number and date. If it is there, you are done and there is nothing to fix. If it is not there, still do not panic. This is routine. Whoever handles your closing will run a title search and catch it, and the standard fix is to go back to the payoff lender for a release, or in some states use a statutory affidavit process. What it costs you is days, not the deal. So raise it now rather than the week you are supposed to fund. Two more things, because your question hints at something you did not spell out. If your father passed away and the home came to you, how title transferred matters far more than the old mortgage does. Whether it moved through probate, through a trust, through a transfer on death or beneficiary deed, or by right of survivorship determines who had legal authority to sign the deed as the heir or successor. If you already closed, escrow and title almost certainly verified this. If you are still in the middle of it, confirm that documentation is in the file. And on taxes, ask a CPA about step-up basis before you assume the worst. When property passes at death, the cost basis generally resets to fair market value as of the date of death, which can erase decades of appreciation and leave you owing far less capital gains tax than you might expect, sometimes none. What substantiates that number is a date of death appraisal or another reliable valuation, so get one if you do not already have it. Tax rules change, this question was asked back in 2025, and your state may treat things differently, so confirm current treatment with your own CPA. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney and not a CPA. Treat the probate and tax pieces above as things to raise with the right licensed person, not as advice you can rely on. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I work with buyers and sellers across Los Angeles, the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. I do not know where your property is, so I am not going to offer to be your agent. Tell me the county and I am glad to connect you with a strong local agent from my network or point you to a title officer who can pull the record for you. Zoltan

Diane, the document you signed controls this, and the single most useful thing you can do right now is pull it out and read four specific lines in it before you tour another house with anyone. The thread already covers the general "read your agreement and ask your agent" advice, so let me give you the actual mechanics. Four things to look for in the paperwork: Whether it says exclusive or non-exclusive. An exclusive buyer representation agreement means that brokerage represents you for any purchase in the described area during the term, even on a home you find yourself. A non-exclusive agreement leaves you free to work with more than one. Read the title line at the top, not just the signature page. The expiration date. Most of these run for a set term. If yours has already run out, your question largely answers itself. The protection period, sometimes called a holdover or carryover clause. This says that if you buy a property the brokerage introduced you to within a set number of days after the agreement ends, compensation is still owed. This is the clause that surprises people. The termination language. Many agreements spell out exactly how either side ends it, and in what form. Now the part almost nobody tells buyers. Your agreement is not with the agent personally. It is with her firm. If you want out, put a short written request to cancel in front of the broker of record, meaning the principal or managing licensee at that firm, not just the agent you have been texting. The agent often does not have authority to release you. Keep a copy and note the date. Many firms will release a buyer who is not a fit rather than carry an unhappy client, but it needs to be in writing and it needs to reach the right person. There is also an amendment form used in Rhode Island for changing an existing buyer representation agreement, covering things like the expiration date, the services provided, and compensation. So if you only want to narrow the agreement rather than kill it, ask to amend rather than terminate. And because many firms practice designated agency, where the brokerage assigns one specific licensee to represent you, moving to a different agent inside the same firm is sometimes far easier than leaving the firm entirely. Ask about that too. Then there is procuring cause. That is the industry term for the unbroken chain of events that leads to a sale. If you tour homes with agent A and then write your offer with agent B, both brokerages can claim they earned the fee. That fight is technically between the two firms, but buyers get pulled into it, and it can hold up a closing. This is real, not hypothetical. So, practically: do not tour with a second agent while an exclusive agreement is live. Get released, let it expire, or amend it first. Walking through open houses on your own is generally fine, though be thoughtful about how you fill out sign in sheets. One note for anyone reading this later. Written buyer agreements became near universal on August 17, 2024, when agents working with buyers were required to have a signed written agreement in place before touring a home. So in 2026 you will run into one of these with essentially every agent you meet, and it is worth knowing how to read one. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney, and I am not licensed in Rhode Island. For a binding read of your exact contract language, an hour with a Rhode Island real estate attorney is money well spent. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I work with buyers and sellers across Los Angeles, the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Rhode Island is not my market, so I am not the right person to be your agent. If you do get released and want someone good near you, I am glad to connect you with a strong local agent from my referral network. Zoltan

You have not done everything wrong. You are asking the question before you have signed anything, which is the correct order and puts you ahead of most first-time buyers I meet. There is no step you have missed yet, because talking to a lender is step one and you are on it. For what it is worth, the National Association of Realtors 2025 buyer survey found that 38 percent of first-time buyers said the hardest part of the whole process was simply understanding the process and the steps. That is the single most common answer first-time buyers give. Feeling lost is the normal state, not a sign you are behind. Here is the mechanical version of what to do next. Talk to three lenders, not one, and do all three inside a two-week span. Here is why the timing matters. Newer FICO scoring models treat multiple mortgage inquiries within a 45-day window as a single inquiry, because they know you are shopping for one loan and not five. Older FICO versions use a 14-day window, and VantageScore deduplicates inquiries in a 14-day window across all inquiry types, not just mortgage. Since you do not control which model a lender pulls, keep every application inside 14 days and you are covered under all of them. FICO also has a 30-day buffer before mortgage inquiries start affecting your score at all. Shopping three lenders does not wreck your credit. Shopping three lenders in three separate months might. Get a Loan Estimate from each one in writing. It is a federally standardized three-page form and every lender's looks identical, which is the entire point: you can lay them side by side and compare line to line. On page 2, look at Section A, Origination Charges. That is the lender's own money: origination fee, underwriting, processing, points. Section B is services you cannot shop for, Section C is services you can shop for. Sections A through C are where lenders actually differ. Sections F and G, prepaids and your initial escrow deposit, are your taxes and insurance rather than their fees, so do not let a lender win on a low total by lowballing an insurance estimate. On page 3, find the Comparisons box. It gives you three numbers built for exactly this: what you will have paid in the first five years, the Annual Percentage Rate, and the Total Interest Percentage. APR folds the fees into the rate, so a low rate bought with heavy points stops looking artificially cheap. Total Interest Percentage tells you what the loan costs over its full life. Compare those three across all three estimates and the winner is usually obvious in four minutes. On who to call, there are three kinds of lenders and each is good at something different. A depository bank often has relationship pricing and is simplest if your accounts already live there, but underwriting can be rigid. A credit union frequently has the lowest fees and the most patience with a first-time buyer, and it is worth checking whether you already qualify for membership through an employer, a family member, or where you live. An independent mortgage broker shops many wholesale lenders at once, which is genuinely valuable if your file has anything unusual in it: self-employment, a short job history, thin credit, or a condo with a tricky HOA. Call one of each and you will learn more than from any article. Now the thing first-time buyers miss most often, and it is real money. Nearly every state has a housing finance agency offering down payment and closing cost assistance, usually as a deferred second loan or a grant, with a first-time buyer requirement, an income cap by county, and a homebuyer education course. In California that agency is CalHFA, and its MyHome Assistance Program is a deferred-payment junior loan for down payment and closing costs that you repay only when you sell, refinance, or transfer. Income limits and assistance amounts get revised on program bulletins, so check calhfa.ca.gov for the numbers in force rather than trusting any article, including this one. Many loan officers never raise these programs because the files take more work. Ask directly whether they are an approved lender for your state housing finance agency and whether you qualify for assistance. If they cannot answer, that tells you something about the loan officer. Two more things. Do the homebuyer education course even if no program requires it. And between now and closing, change nothing about your credit: no new cards, no car loan, no closing old accounts, no large unexplained deposits. You asked this in March 2025, and rates, program guidelines, and income limits have all moved since, so verify current numbers against today's disclosures rather than anything you read from that period. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional working Los Angeles and the South Bay, including the Palos Verdes Peninsula, and I am not a lender, so nothing above is a loan approval. If you are buying here, tell me your rough price range and I will point you to two or three lenders who actually answer the phone and who do CalHFA files, and I will look at your Loan Estimates with you before you pick one. If you are buying in another state, tell me where and I will connect you with a strong local agent from my network who knows that state's assistance programs. Zoltan

There is no standard number, and honestly the count is the wrong thing to be measuring. One open house in three months is not what is keeping your house from selling. Three months on the market without an offer is a pricing or presentation problem, and adding open houses to an overpriced listing just gets more people to walk through and not write. Start with what the data says, because it is not what most people assume. In the National Association of Realtors 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 52 percent of buyers found the home they actually bought on the internet, 27 percent found it through a real estate agent, and nine percent through a friend, relative, or neighbor. The yard sign and open house sign category is a single-digit share and has been for years. Buyers do find open houses useful while they are shopping, 43 percent rated them very useful as a search tool, but useful for browsing and the source of the winning offer are two different things. The same report has a number that should reassure you about your agent. Among sellers who used an agent, 85 percent had the home on the MLS, 67 percent had a yard sign, and 59 percent had an open house held. Which means 41 percent of agent-listed homes never got an open house at all. One in three months is not neglect by industry standards. It is normal. So here is the diagnostic I would run instead. Ask your agent for two numbers: total showings since you listed, and total offers. Those two numbers tell you almost everything. If you have had a healthy volume of showings and no offers, your price is close enough to get people in the door but the house is losing them once they are inside. That is condition, layout, smell, clutter, deferred maintenance, a bad tenant situation, or a price that is fine in theory and ten thousand too high against the specific competing listing buyers saw an hour earlier. That is fixable with staging, a repair, or a modest price adjustment. If you have had almost no showings at all, price and photos are the problem, and it is usually price. Buyers filter by price bracket before they ever see a photo. If you are just above a round-number cutoff, you are invisible to an entire slice of the market. The photos matter too, because 52 percent of buyers found their home online means the first showing is the listing photo, not the front door. If you are getting showings and offers but the offers keep falling apart, that is a financing or inspection problem and a different conversation entirely. Ask for the showing feedback report. Every showing service generates one, and any agent should be able to hand it to you the same day. Read the actual comments rather than the summary. Six buyers independently saying the same thing about your kitchen is not an opinion, it is a market verdict. Also ask what the average days on market is for homes in your price band right now, and whether your cumulative days on market is starting to look stale to agents, because a listing that has sat gets read as a negotiation opportunity regardless of what it is worth. Now the part other answers will not tell you. Open houses are considerably more valuable to the agent than to the seller. They generate buyer leads, sign calls, and neighbor conversations that turn into future listings. That is not corrupt, it is just how the business works, and it means the number of open houses your agent holds is only loosely connected to how fast your house sells. A well-run agent tour, or a targeted campaign to the agents who have sold in your neighborhood in the last twelve months, will typically move your listing more than three more Sunday afternoons. What I would ask your agent for is not more open houses. It is a written market update: showings, offers, feedback themes, the three closest active competitors with their prices and condition, and a specific recommendation with a date attached. If the answer is a price adjustment, get the number and the timing. If the answer is that the market is slow, ask what the comparable listings around you are doing, because slow that applies to everyone is different from slow that applies only to you. You asked this in March 2025, and the market has changed since, so any pricing conversation should be run off current comparable sales rather than what your house was worth when you listed. If the feedback and the numbers are consistent and your agent has no plan beyond waiting, that is a real conversation to have about representation. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, a real estate professional working Los Angeles and the South Bay, including the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If your home is here, send me the address and I will pull the showing and pricing picture and tell you straight whether it is a price problem or a presentation problem. If you are somewhere else, tell me the market and I will connect you with a strong local agent from my network for a second opinion, and a second opinion is worth getting before month four. Zoltan

Usually yes, and here is exactly when. On a conventional loan, most lenders will waive escrow once your loan-to-value is 80 percent or lower, meaning you put at least 20 percent down or you have gotten there through paydown and appreciation. They typically charge a one-time escrow waiver fee, commonly between one eighth and one quarter of a point of the loan amount. On a 400,000 dollar loan, a quarter point is 1,000 dollars out of pocket at closing. Worth knowing that the 80 percent number is a lender convention, not a law. Fannie Mae requires the lender to have a written escrow waiver policy and does not let the lender decide on loan-to-value alone, so credit profile and reserves are part of the call too. Ask for the waiver in writing at application, not at the closing table. Government loans are a different story. FHA loans require an escrow account, full stop, and you cannot buy your way out of it. VA and USDA loans in practice require one too, and where a waiver is theoretically possible the servicer usually layers on overlays that make it unavailable to most borrowers. If escrow-free matters to you, that is a real argument for going conventional if you can qualify. There is one more federal rule that catches people, and it has nothing to do with your down payment. Under the Truth in Lending Act and Regulation Z at 12 CFR 1026.35(b), a higher-priced mortgage loan requires an escrow account that must be maintained for at least five years. A loan is higher-priced when its APR exceeds the average prime offer rate for a comparable transaction by 1.5 percentage points or more on a first lien, 2.5 points or more on a first-lien jumbo, or 3.5 points or more on a subordinate lien. If your rate lands in that zone, whether because of credit, property type, or a niche loan program, the escrow account is mandatory for five years regardless of your equity. The main carve-out is for small creditors operating predominantly in rural or underserved areas that, with their affiliates, made no more than 2,000 first-lien covered transactions in the prior calendar year and meet an asset-size test that gets indexed annually. That is a small community lender exemption, not something you can shop your way into. Now the honest part, because your reasoning deserves a straight answer rather than a lecture. Run the actual math on what you are gaining. Under RESPA, your servicer can only hold a cushion of two months of escrow payments, so the account is not sitting on a year of your money. It is holding roughly two months of taxes and insurance plus whatever has accumulated toward the next due date. On a typical account the average idle balance over a year is a few thousand dollars, and a year of interest on a few thousand dollars is a modest number. It is not nothing, but it is not the reason to reorganize your mortgage either. The risk on the other side is bigger. Property tax bills are large and infrequent, insurance renews annually, and the money has to be there on the day. If you waive escrow you are volunteering to be your own escrow department: a separate account you do not touch, an automatic monthly transfer into it, and a calendar reminder before every due date. Miss a property tax payment badly enough and the lender can force-place the account back on you anyway, and some servicers revoke a waiver after a single late tax payment. So the real question is not interest, it is discipline. If you already automate savings and have never missed a large annual bill, waive it and pocket the interest. If your savings account is also your emergency fund and your vacation fund, keep the escrow. I have watched more than one buyer talk their way out of escrow and then get flattened by the December and April tax installments. If you are buying in California, there is a specific reason to be careful. After the county reassesses on change of ownership, a supplemental tax bill arrives that is not on any of your closing paperwork, and it is often thousands of dollars in the first year. With escrow, the servicer usually absorbs it and adjusts your payment. Without escrow, that bill is yours to catch, and Los Angeles County buyers get surprised by it every single year. I am a real estate professional, not a lender or a CPA, so get the waiver terms and the fee in writing from your loan officer and confirm your loan is not a higher-priced mortgage loan before you assume the waiver is available. Rates and program rules have moved since March 2025, so verify against today's disclosures rather than an old quote. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I work Los Angeles and the South Bay, including the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If you are buying here, I am happy to look at your Loan Estimate with you and tell you whether the waiver is worth the fee on your actual numbers. If you are buying elsewhere, tell me the market and I will connect you with a strong local agent from my network who knows the property tax calendar where you are, because that calendar is really what this decision turns on. Zoltan

You caught something real. There are two completely different things in your transaction, both called escrow, and nobody tells you that. The one your agent is talking about ends at closing. The one your loan officer is talking about starts at closing. The first is the transaction escrow, sometimes called the closing or settlement. It is a neutral third party that holds your earnest money deposit, the signed documents, the title paperwork, and eventually the loan funds. It follows written instructions signed by both you and the seller and it cannot favor either of you. It collects the payoff demand on the seller's loan, orders the title policy, prorates taxes between you and the seller, records the deed with the county, disburses the money, and then closes the file. That escrow is a temporary bank account and a referee, and it goes away the day you get the keys. Who runs it depends on where you are buying. In California and most of the West, an independent escrow company or the escrow arm of a title company handles the closing. In California those independent escrow agents are licensed corporations regulated by the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation under the Escrow Law, Division 6 of the Financial Code starting at Section 17000, with rules at Title 10 of the California Code of Regulations starting at Section 1700. Banks, savings institutions, title companies and licensed real estate offices operate under exemptions. In much of the East and the South, a real estate attorney runs the same process, and there it is usually called settlement rather than escrow. Same job, different chair. The second escrow is the one your loan officer means, and it is properly called an impound account or a mortgage escrow account. It begins at closing and runs for the life of the loan. Every month your servicer collects one twelfth of your annual property tax bill and one twelfth of your homeowners insurance premium along with your principal and interest, plus mortgage insurance and flood insurance if you have them. Then the servicer pays those bills for you when they come due. That is what people mean by PITI. Your payment is not just principal and interest. Here is the part that hits at the closing table. You have to prefund that account. On your Loan Estimate, Section F is Prepaids, which is typically your first full year of homeowners insurance premium plus per-diem interest, and Section G is Initial Escrow Payment at Closing, which is the several months of taxes and insurance the lender seeds the account with. That is real cash on top of your down payment, and it is the single most common closing cost surprise I see. Once the account is running, your servicer performs an escrow analysis at least once a year. It projects the next twelve months of tax and insurance disbursements and compares them to the projected balance. Under RESPA, Regulation X at 12 CFR 1024.17, the servicer may hold a cushion of no more than two months of escrow payments, which is another way of saying the lowest projected monthly balance cannot exceed one sixth of the annual disbursements. State law or your mortgage document can require less, never more. If the analysis shows a shortage of one month's payment or more, the servicer can let it stand or spread the repayment across at least twelve months. If it shows a surplus of 50 dollars or more and you are current, they must refund it within 30 days. That analysis is why your payment changes even on a fixed rate loan. Property taxes rise, insurance rises, and in California there is one more trap. Your first-year escrow is often set using the seller's old assessed value. After the county reassesses on change of ownership, a supplemental tax bill shows up and the escrow account is suddenly short, sometimes badly. Los Angeles County buyers get caught by this constantly. When your servicer runs that first analysis, expect a payment increase and a shortage repayment, and set money aside for it now rather than being surprised in month fourteen. You asked this in March 2025, and the insurance side of the math has moved a lot in California since, so escrow shortages have gotten more common, not less. I am a real estate professional, not a lender, so ask your loan officer to walk you line by line through Sections F and G on your Loan Estimate and ask your escrow officer for an estimated settlement statement before you wire anything. Both of those requests are completely normal and both should be answered the same day. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I work Los Angeles and the South Bay, including the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If you are buying here, send me your Loan Estimate and I will sit with you and your loan officer and go through both escrows until the numbers make sense. If you are buying in another state, tell me where and I will connect you with a strong local agent from my network who can do the same thing with the closing rules that apply where you are. Zoltan

A Mexican corporation can own US real estate outright, and no federal law stops it, but it gets taxed twice over: on the rent while it holds the property, and again on the sale. The number that catches people is the FIRPTA withholding at closing. It is 15 percent of the gross sales price, not 15 percent of the profit, and the buyer is legally the one on the hook to withhold it. Start with the rent. Rental income from US real property paid to a foreign corporation defaults to FDAP treatment, which means a flat 30 percent tax on gross rent with zero deductions. No depreciation, no property tax, no insurance, no mortgage interest, no management fee. That is usually a disaster. The fix is the net election under IRC section 882(d) for corporations (section 871(d) is the parallel provision for individuals), which treats the real property income as effectively connected with a US trade or business. Once it is effectively connected income, you are taxed on net profit at the 21 percent federal corporate rate and every ordinary expense comes off the top. Missing that election in year one is one of the most expensive mistakes in this whole area. Now the sale. FIRPTA (IRC sections 897 and 1445) treats gain on a US real property interest as effectively connected income and forces withholding. The buyer files Form 8288 and Form 8288-A and remits by the 20th day after the transfer date. The seller gets a stamped copy of the 8288-A and uses it to claim credit on the US return. There are reduced rates, 10 percent at or under 1,000,000 dollars and zero at or under 300,000 dollars, but both require an individual buyer taking the property as a residence, so a corporate seller cannot plan around them. The real tool is Form 8288-B, the withholding certificate application, filed roughly 90 days before closing to knock withholding down to the actual expected tax. It needs a basis schedule and a real gain computation, not an estimate. Then the layer most people never mention. Under IRC section 884, on top of the 21 percent corporate tax, a foreign corporation owes a branch profits tax of 30 percent of its dividend equivalent amount, roughly the after-tax US earnings it pulls out rather than reinvests. This is where the treaty earns its keep. Article 11A of the 1992 US-Mexico income tax convention caps the branch profits tax on a qualified resident of Mexico at 5 percent. Thirty down to five is the whole ballgame, and it is why the limitation on benefits article matters so much: you have to actually qualify as a treaty resident, not merely be incorporated in Mexico. There is also a narrow election under IRC section 897(i), available where a treaty grants nondiscriminatory treatment, to be treated as a domestic corporation for purposes of sections 897 and 6039C, with the filing mechanics in Treasury Regulation 1.897-3. Restrictions on ownership are mostly state law, and this part has moved fast since you asked in March 2025. By the end of 2025 roughly 36 states had enacted some restriction on foreign ownership of real property, most of it aimed at agricultural land, land near military installations, and critical infrastructure, and several amended again in 2026. California is not one of them. SB 224 never became law and SB 1176 failed passage in committee in April 2026. Separately, farmland anywhere triggers reporting under the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978, and USDA opened an online AFIDA portal in January 2026. One California wrinkle if the property is here. California stacks its own withholding on top of FIRPTA: 3.33 percent of the sales price on FTB Form 593, remitted by escrow by the 20th day of the month after closing, with an alternative calculation available based on the gain actually recognized. Combined, a Mexican corporation selling in Los Angeles can watch 18.33 percent of the gross price get held back before anyone computes the actual tax owed. There is one more reason these structures get built the way they do, and it is not income tax. A non-US individual who owns US real estate directly gets a US estate tax exemption of only 60,000 dollars against a top federal rate of 40 percent, and the July 2025 tax act raised the US citizen exemption to 15 million dollars while leaving that 60,000 dollar figure untouched. Stock in a foreign corporation is generally not US-situs property. That is the classic estate tax argument for holding through a Mexican entity, and it cuts against the income tax arguments above. Structure choice is a trade, not a right answer. I am a real estate professional, not a CPA and not an attorney, and this is an area where you hire both before you take title, not after. Unwinding a bad holding structure costs far more than building it correctly. Ask for a cross-border CPA who does inbound Mexico to US work and can name the 882(d) election and the 8288-B process without looking them up. I am Zoltan Peresztegi, and I work Los Angeles and the South Bay, including the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If the property is here, I am glad to run the numbers with you and coordinate with your tax team on the escrow side, which is where FIRPTA and the FTB 593 actually get executed. If you are buying elsewhere in the country, tell me the market and I will connect you with a strong local agent from my network who handles foreign-entity purchases. Zoltan

Eighteen in 47 states and the District of Columbia. Nineteen in Alabama and Nebraska. Twenty one in Mississippi. That is the legal answer, and it is the least interesting part of the question, because the age of majority is not really what stops a young buyer. Capacity is. Here is the mechanism. A minor's contract is voidable by the minor. In California, Family Code 6710 says a contract of a minor may be disaffirmed by the minor before reaching majority or within a reasonable time afterwards. California goes a step further at Family Code 6701, which says a minor cannot make a contract relating to real property or any interest in it at all. Other states word it differently, but the disaffirmance principle is close to universal. Now think about what that means to the people on the other side of the table. A seller who signs with a minor has a deal the minor can walk away from, while the seller stays bound. A title company underwriting that transfer is looking at a chain of title that can be unwound later, which makes the title unmarketable. And a lender writing a note that the borrower can disaffirm is booking an asset that may not be enforceable. That is the real reason this does not happen, and it is why the objection lands at the purchase agreement and at title long before anyone gets to underwriting. So the practical routes for a minor to end up owning real property are all structures where a competent adult, not the minor, does the contracting. An adult buys and holds title, usually a parent or guardian, on the loan and on the deed, with the minor living there. Simple, and by far the most common. Title is held by a trust with an adult trustee. The trust is the contracting party and the minor is the beneficiary. This is the cleanest version when the goal is genuinely to put the asset in the child's hands. A custodial arrangement, where a custodian holds the property for the minor until a set age under the transfers to minors statute in that state. The rules on what property qualifies and when it terminates vary by state, so this one goes to an estate attorney before anyone writes an offer. A court supervised guardianship of the estate, where a court appointed guardian holds and manages property for the minor. Slow and formal, but it exists for a reason. Now the more common real world version of this question: the eighteen year old who is legally an adult and still cannot get approved. Two things are usually happening. First, there is often no credit score at all. FICO's minimum scoring criteria require at least one account that has been open six months or more and at least one account reported to the bureaus within the past six months. An eighteen year old who opened a card in March is not scoreable in June, no matter how perfectly they have paid. Fix that early: become an authorized user on a parent's seasoned account, open a secured card or a credit builder loan, and let six months run before you need the score. There is also a manual path, since FHA allows a lender to develop a nontraditional credit history using a Non-Traditional Mortgage Credit Report or verified rent, utility and insurance payment records, but that file gets manually underwritten and needs a lender who actually does that work. Second is income history. Underwriters generally want to see a documented, stable earnings record, which a person two months out of high school does not have. Time in the job, or a co-borrower, is the answer there. What is not a legitimate obstacle is being young. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act and Regulation B at 12 CFR 1002.6 say a creditor may not take an applicant's age into account, provided the applicant has the capacity to enter a binding contract. Once you are of age in your state and you can contract, a lender cannot decline you for being twenty. They can decline you for a thin file, and those two things get confused all the time. Know the difference and say so. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney or a lender, so the trust and custodial structures belong in front of an estate attorney and a CPA before anyone signs anything. Since this question was asked in March 2025, confirm current lending guidelines with a loan officer rather than relying on anything written back then. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work Los Angeles, the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If you are here and trying to buy young, or a parent trying to set a child up, I will map the structure and connect you with a lender who does manual underwriting. If you are somewhere else, tell me your city and I will connect you with an agent in my network there. Zoltan

There is no general three day right to cancel a home purchase or sale contract. That rule does not exist for sellers. The three day rule people are remembering is federal, it is the Truth in Lending right of rescission under Regulation Z at 12 CFR 1026.23, and it applies to certain refinances and home equity lines secured by a principal residence. It does not apply to a purchase, and it does not apply to a seller at all. So do not plan around it. But read your own message again, because there may be very good news in it. You wrote that your daughter made a counteroffer this morning. A counteroffer is an offer, and an offer can normally be revoked any time before acceptance is communicated back. In California that is Civil Code 1586: a proposal may be revoked at any time before its acceptance is communicated to the proposer, but not afterwards. The C.A.R. Seller Counter Offer form says the same thing in plain language: a binding agreement is created when a copy of the signed acceptance is personally received by the seller or the seller's authorized agent, and the seller may withdraw the counteroffer any time before that happens. So the only question that matters right now is whether the buyer has both signed her counteroffer and delivered a copy of that signature back to her or to her agent. If that has not happened yet, she can very likely pull it. If that is the case, do this today, not tomorrow. Call her agent immediately and instruct them to withdraw the counteroffer in writing, signed and delivered to the buyer's agent, with a timestamp. Not a phone call. Not a text saying she is having second thoughts. A signed written withdrawal, delivered, and documented. Every hour matters, because if the signed acceptance lands first, the window closes. Now the other branch. If the counteroffer was already accepted and that acceptance was delivered, she is in contract, and a seller cannot cancel unilaterally. Her realistic exits from there are three. One, the buyer agrees to let her out, which is the normal and by far the best path, usually documented on a mutual cancellation and release. Two, a contingency that runs in her favor, which sellers rarely have unless someone wrote one in, such as a replacement property contingency. Three, the buyer defaults on their own obligations, which she cannot count on. She should understand what she is risking if she simply refuses to close. A buyer can sue for specific performance, which means asking a court to order the sale to happen rather than just award money. California makes this unusually available to buyers: Civil Code 3387 presumes that money damages cannot adequately compensate for the breach of an agreement to transfer real property, and for a single family dwelling the buyer intends to occupy, that presumption is conclusive. A buyer can also record a lis pendens, which clouds title and effectively freezes the property. Add attorney fees, which many purchase contracts shift to the prevailing party, and walking away quietly becomes the most expensive option on the table. What actually works in practice is money and speed. Most buyers are reasonable if you move fast and treat them fairly. Have her agent reach out to the buyer's agent today, explain the situation honestly, and offer to reimburse the buyer's real out of pocket costs, inspection, appraisal, loan application and escrow charges. That conversation on day two costs a fraction of what it costs on day thirty after the buyer has given notice on their apartment. One more thing, because it is where the confusion often starts in California. There is a three day right to cancel tied to the Transfer Disclosure Statement, but it belongs to the buyer after receiving disclosures, not to the seller. Different right, different party, no help here. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney, and this is exactly the kind of question that needs a real estate attorney and her listing agent's manager on the phone today. This question was originally asked in March 2025, so if any part of this is still live, get current advice rather than relying on anything written back then. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work Los Angeles, the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If your daughter is selling anywhere in my area, I am happy to walk her through the withdrawal mechanics at no charge. If she is somewhere else, tell me the city and I will connect you with an agent in my network there who can move on this today. Zoltan

Taran, the key insight for your situation: you are not selling two properties, you are selling into two completely different buyer pools, and the marketing for each looks nothing alike. One agent can absolutely handle both, but interview for both skills. The land: builders do not browse Zillow the way families do. The effective play is direct outreach: your agent should pull the permits filed in North Royalton and the surrounding suburbs over the past couple of years, see which builders are actively building there, and contact them directly with a simple package (lot dimensions, utilities at the street or not, zoning, any wetland or setback constraints). Builders price land backward from what they can sell the finished house for, minus construction cost, minus their margin. That means the best price comes from the builder whose product fits your lot, not from waiting for a portal inquiry. Deals with builders also sometimes come with longer due diligence periods while they verify feasibility; that is normal, just cap it in the contract. The fixer: your buyers are investors and renovation-loan buyers. Price it honestly for condition and it will move fast, because that inventory is scarce. Have your agent note in the listing that renovation financing is welcome; buyers using FHA 203(k) or similar renovation loans widen your pool beyond cash flippers, and competition between those two groups is what protects your price. When you interview agents, ask each one: "Tell me about a lot you sold to a builder, and a fixer you sold, in the last two years." The right agent has a concrete story for both. Selling them through one agent also lets you sequence closings if you need the proceeds to land together. I am a real estate professional in Los Angeles' South Bay, and if you would like, I am happy to connect you with a strong agent from my network in the Cleveland area who works both land and investor product. Zoltan

Yes, and in California it is two documents, not one. The disclosure that gets the buyer acknowledged, and the confirmation that gets the agency stated in the contract. Skip either one and the file is not clean. Here is the California chain, since that is the state I can speak to with citations. Civil Code 2079.14 requires the agent to deliver the statutory agency disclosure and obtain a signed acknowledgment of receipt. Civil Code 2079.16 prescribes what that document looks like and its title, Disclosure Regarding Real Estate Agency Relationship. The C.A.R. version is Form AD. Civil Code 2079.17 then requires that the actual agency relationship be confirmed in the purchase contract itself, or in a separate writing executed or acknowledged prior to or at the same time as the contract. So the acknowledgment of receipt and the confirmation of the relationship are two separate obligations, and agents routinely handle the first and forget the second. For your exact situation, C.A.R. publishes Buyer Non-Agency, Form BNA. It is the seller's broker telling an unrepresented buyer in writing that the broker is acting on behalf of the seller only and is not that buyer's agent. That is the form you are looking for. Pull the current version out of your forms library rather than a saved copy, because C.A.R. does a December release and a June release plus interim ones, and a superseded version does not carry the same protection. Now the part that actually decides whether you are covered, and it is not the form. California recognizes agency created by conduct. If you sign the BNA and then spend three weeks advising that buyer on price, coaching them on repair requests, drafting their offer, and telling them what to counter, you have arguably made yourself their agent regardless of what the signature page says. The disclosure describes the relationship. Your behavior creates it. Draw the line in writing and then hold it: you will provide ministerial acts, documents, access, and factual information about the property, and you will not advise them on price, terms, negotiation strategy, or whether to proceed. Put that scope in writing and stay inside it. A few more things I would do on a file like this. Recommend in writing that the buyer retain their own agent or an attorney, and keep the email. Document every disclosure delivery with a date and a signature, because an unrepresented buyer has nobody else generating a paper trail. Handle compensation separately and explicitly, since after the August 2024 practice changes there is no buyer representation agreement in play and anything that buyer is paying you needs its own signed writing. Confirm your errors and omissions carrier is comfortable with the arrangement. And loop your own manager or designated officer in before you go under contract, not after something goes sideways. On other states, I am not going to invent form codes. Form names, required disclosures and even the underlying agency framework vary enormously, and several states use transaction brokerage or designated agency models where the analysis is completely different. Confirm three things with your own sources: what your state real estate commission requires by statute, what your local or state association's current form is called, and what your own broker's policy manual says you must use. Your broker's policy is often stricter than the law, and it is the one you will be held to internally. I am a real estate professional, not an attorney. If you are a C.A.R. member, the Legal Hotline is the authoritative resource on form specific questions and it is worth the call before you get creative. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work Los Angeles, the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula, so I run into unrepresented buyers on listings fairly often. If you are working a California file and want to compare notes on how to structure the disclosures and the scope letter, reach out. If you are outside California, tell me your state and I will point you toward an agent in my network there who can tell you exactly which form your association publishes. Zoltan

Your pre-approval is not a budget. It is a measure of your gross income against the debts that show up on your credit report, and it knows nothing about your 401k contributions, your childcare, your car repairs, your travel, or how much cash you want left over at the end of the month. That is the entire gap you are feeling. Here is how to close it. Start by building the real payment, not the mortgage payment. With 20 percent down on 500,000 you are borrowing 400,000. On a 30 year fixed, principal and interest runs about 2,398 dollars a month at 6.0 percent, about 2,528 at 6.5 percent, and about 2,661 at 7.0 percent. Use whatever rate you were actually quoted, not a headline number. Then add property tax. In California, Proposition 13 sets the base ad valorem rate at 1 percent of assessed value, and voter approved bonds push most Los Angeles County parcels into the 1.1 to 1.25 percent range. On a 500,000 dollar purchase that is roughly 458 to 521 dollars a month. Your state may be very different, so pull the actual tax bill for the specific property, not a state average. Then homeowners insurance. Do not estimate this one, get a real quote on a real address before you write an offer. Premiums in fire exposed and coastal areas have moved enough in the last two years to break a budget that looked fine on paper. Then HOA dues if there are any, at the actual current amount, plus any special assessment on the horizon. Then the line nobody puts on the sheet: a maintenance reserve. Plan on 1 to 2 percent of the value of the home per year, which on 500,000 is roughly 417 to 833 dollars a month set aside. That is a planning rule of thumb rather than a law, but water heaters, roofs and HVAC systems do not care what your budget said. Now the underwriting side, so you know what the lender was measuring. Fannie Mae's Selling Guide caps total debt to income at 36 percent of gross for a manually underwritten loan, with an exception path to 45 percent when credit score and reserves support it. Run through Desktop Underwriter, the maximum allowable is 50 percent. FHA works off a 31 percent housing ratio and a 43 percent total ratio, and can stretch toward 50 percent with compensating factors like reserves, a high score, or a low loan to value. So when your lender said 500,000, they may well have been approving you at a total debt load near half your gross income. Legal, common, and a rough way to live. Here is the method I would use instead, and it takes about twenty minutes. Pull your last three months of bank and credit card statements. Total everything that is not housing: food, transportation, insurance, childcare, subscriptions, debt payments, travel, the real number, not the aspirational one. Add what you actually want to save each month, retirement plus cash. Subtract that total from your average monthly take-home pay, the number that lands in your account after taxes and benefits. What is left is your true housing ceiling. Then compare it to the full build above. If the build is bigger than the ceiling, 500,000 is not your number no matter what the letter says. One thing your 20 percent down is definitely buying: no private mortgage insurance. Under the Homeowners Protection Act of 1998, a borrower who puts less down can request cancellation at 80 percent loan to value and gets automatic termination at 78 percent, but you skip the whole exercise by starting at 80. Just make sure putting 20 percent down does not leave you without reserves. I would rather see a buyer put 15 percent down, carry PMI for a while, and keep six months of expenses in cash than go in at 20 percent with an empty account. Two more cash items. Closing costs typically run 2 to 5 percent of the price, so 10,000 to 25,000 dollars here, and that is separate from your down payment. And budget for the first ninety days of ownership, which is always more expensive than anyone expects. Since this was asked in March 2025, note that rates, insurance pricing and program terms have all shifted, so rebuild these numbers with a current quote rather than a two year old one. I am a real estate professional, not a lender or a CPA, so have your loan officer confirm the ratios and your accountant confirm the tax side. I am Zoltan Peresztegi and I work Los Angeles, the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If you are buying here, I will build this sheet with you line by line before you tour anything. If you are elsewhere, tell me your city and I will connect you with an agent in my network who will do the same. Zoltan