This is my first diary at DK4. Mostly, I need input because I am just suspicious, and perhaps a bit gullible. My husband and I are in escrow on a bank owned house, and we just found out that roughly half the house is unpermitted, so the lender (a different bank) wont finance it. As a result, we will have paid for inspections and will pay the appraiser who cued us into this problem. We've also put aside the earnest fee by giving it to our realtor for safe-keeping. Unfortunately before we learned about the ultimate meaning of the permitting problem, the earnest fee was just mailed to the seller, good old Fannie Mae. I'm betting it'll be hard to get back that earnest money.
My paranoid question is this: are banks using people like us to pay for inspections and appraisals of the real estate they're acquiring? Is this a scam? We'll be out $800 to $2000.00 and have to walk away from this sale, which is truly better than owning an unsafe house, but is this happening to anyone else? And all the negotiations that we've endured, just to come to contract have been ridiculously one-sided, with addendums that say everything, all at once, contracts that say one thing in one line and the opposite in a later line.
I'd love all your thoughts on this. Perhaps it's a ridiculous suspicion.
