A friend and I booked 3 houses in boise, idaho on 7/2/05 with Corey
Barton Homes.
on 7/1/05 they had a 10k price increase so we back-dated the contracts to 6/30/05, & offered the lower price to see if this would fly. Apparently it did. they accepted all the contracts.
all the contracts had around 8 or 9 counter offers with several lines of wording on each one. somewhere around the 5th or 6th counter they sneaked in a price increase of 10k onto 2 of the contracts.
since I was busy with several other investments I didn’t notice it until a few more counters had flown by. neither did my partner and neither did the agent [who i’m not that happy with for several reasons].
each counter had the price break-down of base price + lot premium + fencing + upgrades + closing costs so it was rather confusing, plus
they had other stuff in there. there was no real total amount and we just assumed the pricing would stay the same.
We argued and they fixed one. however they’re unwilling to fix the other one saying that we back-dated the original so they had just adjusted the price back to the original. [somehow this wasn’t an issue on the houses. ]
My take is, if thats true then they should have been open and honest
about the price increase. not just sneak it in in the middle of a counter-offer. I think they already knew about the back-dated offer from day 1, but are using that as an excuse. I suspect they might be routinely springing this on out-of-state investors.[we did not hide the fact that it was to be an investment property]
you think its worth getting an attorney to write them a letter or suing over this 11k discrepancy or should we just let it slide ? we haven’t closed on the house yet but we will in about a month.
I also feel my agent is responsible for making sure errors like this don’t occur.