Our new next-door neighbors were told that the house they just bought included sprinkling...it does not. Just one more way our previous neighbor was a jerk. How does one knowingly sell a home with features listed that don't actually exist? And they discovered that their garage is too shallow to park their minivan. This house is <2 years old. I'm not even sure how a garage so small meets building code.

We got semi-screwed when we sold our previous place this past Dec. It was an old fixer-upper. Like everyone else who bought ~2000 we lost money selling 13 years later. We were just happy to have TWO offers within 24 hours of listing, since we live nearly an hour away and were tired of the long drive to maintain the old place. We accepted the first one (both offers were nearly the same amt). Both were rural development financing. No one informed us that this meant that many things needed to be above and beyond standard code (our realtor doesn't really sell up in the rural area where this house was located, so it wasn't a scenario he was familiar with). So we ended up paying thousands of dollars to fix several minor things that wouldn't have required repair with standard financing options.

We also had a couple grand put in escrow, since the detached garage needed repainting. This was to be done as soon as the weather improved enough for painting. We rode our bikes past our old place maybe a month ago and painting still had not been done...and our money still sits in escrow (and a broke-down car sits in what was our backyard). If they're not going to use it, then I wish we could have it back.

In hindsight, had we known this would likely end up a rural development loan situation, we likely would have asked $5-10k more, or simply not accepted anything other than standard mortgage offers, to begin with. We ended up having to write a check for a couple grand at closing. When we accepted the offer we thought we'd be the ones getting a small check.