Closing

Tips that helped us:

Find out the name and contact information of the Escrow Officer handling your file at the Title Company and introduce yourself early. Get phone and email contact information.

Understand that he/she is probably doing over 100 of these in a month, and has little time to focus on yours.

We found it advantageous to talk to him/her early and understand the steps and make sure it keeps progressing, because you are up against a closing deadline that seems to apply to you (under penalty) but the seller and Title Company can miss all their milestones leaving you no time. Some of the key items:

- Disclosure statement from the HOA – they need you to pay for that and no it cannot be just added to the closing costs. And the online pay facility may not like your Canadian “zip code” that you type in to validate your credit card. That may require a phone call to the intermediary collecting the fee; or to the HOA. When we ran into this roadblock, our Real Estate Pro paid the fee and added it to his invoice. Thank you! Remember the need for a good Real Estate Pro?

- Contracts will be faxed back and forth. By the way, the contract (offer) that you already submitted? No good. The selling Bank has their own, which puts more of the fees on you. Offensive, but just understand that the total is going to be 1.5% of closing costs or thereabouts and don’t worry about how you get there. The selling bank is taking a huge write-down on the house value so maybe the slight shift in fees is not such a big deal. Ours was just under $2K on a $115K purchase.

- You were probably advised to write the offer as “cash” with a quick closing date and no conditions to make your offer attractive to the seller. That’s what we did, and it probably helped achieve the lowest purchase price. But you still want to have the property inspected so there are no surprises, and you don’t have much time. This is where the Real Estate Pro comes in. Again. Hopefully he/she has the processes and contacts in place that you will need to get this done on time.

- The offer was probably in your own name(s), but you may have decided to hold the property in an LLC or LLP. If that is the case, we found that explaining the situation to the Escrow Officer and asking her to file one more Warranty Deed to transfer the property into the entity's name was a convenient way to go.