Resolving Legal Issues With Your Home Sale
Your home sale is a complex process that involves a great deal of work. You have to get your home ready for staging and showing, arrange for an inspection and start searching for the right buyer. However, this isn’t all that it takes for a successful home sale. There may be one or more legal issues that can prevent you from closing the deal in a good time frame.
Resolving these legal issues beforehand takes time and effort but if you don’t take care of them, you could delay or even prevent your home sale. Working hard to clear up any outstanding issues will simplify the process in the long run.
Here’s how to take care of some of the most common legal issues that can affect a home sale.
Outstanding Debts
If you owe significant debts on your home, or a lien or encumbrance has been placed on your property, you will need to take care of this before selling your home. Trying to sell your home when it has outstanding debts or liens placed against it can get you into serious trouble. If you think that these debts or encumbrances can be hidden, think again. These items always show up on a home listing and trying to conceal them may push buyers away. If the buyers purchase your home, the amount of the debt can be removed from the final payment you receive from the sale.
Organizing Ownership
If you are not the sole owner of the home, you need to straighten out ownership conflicts ahead of time. You may not have the legal right to sell a property for which you are not the sole owner. If you own a property with other family members, they may have the right to have a say in how the sale is completed. If you share ownership with a spouse and you are going through a divorce, you need to clear up any issues before proceeding with a sale.
You may have to hire an attorney and go through negotiations in order to figure out how to sell the property, consolidate ownership or disburse the funds from the sale. Taking care of these things upfront will prevent frustration down the road.
Prepare Paperwork
You need to arrange and organize all of the paperwork associated with your home ownership to find and correct any problems for the home sale. You’ll need to gather appraisal forms, accounts of outstanding debts and any agreements you have made with attorneys and co-owners. If you have had any major repairs or work done on the home, you’ll need to gather up that documentation as well.
Sit down with your attorney and work through all of these documents one by one until you locate any and all outstanding issues. The sooner that you can resolve these issues, the sooner that you can successfully sell your home.
Tackling the legal issues surrounding your home sale is not a task that you handle on your own. Hire an experienced attorney to help you with this to make sure that you don’t miss anything important.