When you sell a home, you’re going to get to know two people pretty well: your agent and your attorney. Your team should enjoy comfortable working relationships with one another.

I’d had a business relationship with our attorney for some years. He had handled some deals with me in the past. Pam and I met with him March 27, 2013. We had no plans for staying in New Jersey with the sale underway. It had been a cold month or so preparing our home for market, and we were anxious to return to Florida to warm up a little. We left the meeting feeling comfortable with the representation.

I chose our real estate agent partly because I owed her a favor. She’d helped us to buy the place back in 2000. Over the years we stayed in touch and she’d done some market research for me along the way. At some point I said that if/when we sold the place I’d call. I do what I say I’ll do – it’s one of my guiding principles – so that’s who I called.

No, I’m not mentioning any names. The smallish agency she now worked had been in town for a long time, it was a name I knew. We signed our agreement March 29, 2013, planning to hit the market April 2. I sold our log splitter to my agent’s boss, a co-owner at the agency, as he left after a visit..

With that stroke of the pen we became part of the Real Estate Sales Process. We hit the road for Florida the very next day.

The Process
Nobody talks directly in a real estate deal. All conversation with the buyer goes through agents and attorneys. It’s kind of like driving your car from the backseat, where the driver describes what they see and you respond with detailed instructions. “It looks like the road ahead may curve to the left a little and we could be approaching the right shoulder.” “Try reducing speed by 12% and rotate the steering wheel counterclockwise 11 degrees for… 3.5 seconds. How’s that?” It’s a hugely inefficient and frustrating process. When you’re a thousand miles away the process is accomplished with email, phone, fax, and the occasional overnight courier. I suppose it serves to keep the buyer and seller from getting nasty with one another. But still. The process, in (very) broad strokes, goes something like this:

• Take an offer and negotiate a contract price.
• Make a contract, which effectively takes the home off the market.
• Have the attorneys review the contract, make adjustments, and create an actual contract.
• Research the title.
• Have a home inspection, wait for the results.
• Maybe make repairs/adjustments, maybe negotiate the price some more, maybe revise the contract as needed. Maybe repeat.
• Satisfy outstanding issues. Utilities, taxes, fees, town requirements, etc.
• Close the deal.

This thing I’ve called a contract? In real estate, a contract doesn’t carry any more weight than the scribbling on the back of a napkin. The first thing attorneys do in their review is agree to remove any teeth they find in the boilerplate. It’s a roadmap filled with uncertainty. Buyer will put this amount of money on the table by some date, some more by another date, there’s this much time to get an inspection done, the deal may close by that date, and so on. But if anyone misses a milestone it doesn’t really matter. The paper may or, often, may not be rewritten to accommodate.

The contract doesn’t actually become concrete until the money and property change hands at the closing table. At that point it becomes nearly impossible to reverse.

If there’s a mortgage involved there’s more. The bank steps into the process early with their own brand of complexity. The appraisal is an important step, where they look into market data as well as look the home over before deciding how much the home’s worth. And, of course, the credit checks. When a buyer steps into the pipeline they might not have an existing relationship with a bank, essentially still shopping for funding. A buyer could be pre-qualified, which means the bank is open to considering loaning some funds. Or, the buyer could be pre-approved, which means that the bank has agreed to loan up to some amount – provided that the appraisal process doesn’t stop the deal along the way. These designations are archaic and mostly mean nothing today.

That’s the barest minimum description of the process that I can muster. It takes an average 60-90 days to get through the process. And while the process is underway you’re essentially off the market. A home could be shown while it’s under contract, but in practice it never is.

If you’re thinking the process is fragile, with many things that can derail the deal along the way, well, that’s right. We went through the process, to various stages, several times before we reached the closing table.