House purchase contract – the story of Mrs. Hana

Our property contract inspection service usually costs around one to two per cent of the purchase price of the property, we are personally liable to you for the work we do and we are insured against our own errors.

Mrs Hannah’s whole problem was about damp rising from the foundations of the house. Mrs Hannah had made the purchase of the house conditional on the seller remedying the defects at his expense. However, she had forgotten the most important thing, she had not checked whether this obligation of the seller was actually covered in the purchase contract.

All the documentation for the purchase of the house was prepared for Ms Hanna by the real estate agency. In fact, the real estate agent had assured her orally on several occasions that the legal documentation contained everything she needed and that the purchase of the house was “completely safe” for her and that she only had to “sign”. This was not the case, as Hana found out when she took possession of the house after the purchase and demanded in vain that the seller fulfil what he had promised. That is to say, to waterproof the place where the water had risen at his own expense.

Ms Hana turned to us to enforce her claim against the seller. When we made a written demand on behalf of Mrs Hana that the seller fulfil what he had promised, the seller simply stated dryly that he could not remember any such agreement. Moreover, the purchase contract contained a clause that Mrs. Hana was buying the house without any defects and that she had seen this on the spot. We also contacted the real estate agent, who, however, did not want to admit his mistake and his representative only stubbornly repeated that the broker had not made any mistake and that the purchase contract contained everything necessary. There was no written documentation, only verbal agreements.

In such a situation, we could not advise Ms. Hana to pursue her claim against the seller in court, because she would not be able to prove this, she would lose the lawsuit and she would also bear the costs of the court proceedings.

This left only the aftertaste, the increased cost of acquiring the property and also a lesson for Ms Hana in that if someone is buying property and investing their living costs, they should have their contract documentation checked by a solicitor who only works for them.

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