A few years back, during the pandemic, I had a particularly memorable closing. Unfortunately, it was not memorable for any good reason. Every single thing was going wrong. My paralegal had an emergency and was not in the office. My clients, the buyers, had gone to do their walk-through that morning. They found rats in the house. Additionally, built-in shelving that was included in the purchase had been removed from two different rooms in the house, including an entire wall of mudroom built-ins. The seller was nowhere to be found. The seller‘s attorney was nowhere to be found. When I finally tracked down his assistant and told her about the rats, she said a few rats should not bother anyone and they certainly wouldn’t bother her. Gross. Honestly, I have had so many closings where sellers have pulled these types of stunts that despite all the problems, in a normal… read more →
While you are negotiating your contract for purchase of real estate, or during your attorney and inspection review periods, you (the Buyer) may reach a point where you need to make a decision about a closing cost credit or a purchase price reduction. For some reason or other, you and the seller have agreed on a financial concession in your favor. At this point, you need to decide how you should receive that concession. If you are purchasing in cash, the simplest thing to do is to reduce the purchase price. Since you are a cash purchaser, you will be paying your purchase price and all of your closing cost at closing anyway. There is no lender involved to make things messy, so you might as well take a straight reduction on the purchase price. At some point when the county goes back and looks at the sale of the… read more →
If you are thinking about setting up a land trust, you should educate yourself. Does a land trust even make sense for you? What are the benefits of putting your real estate in a land trust? What’s the downside? And of course, what types of land trust options do you have in the state of Illinois? In its essence, a land trust is simply a trust created to hold real estate. In most cases, one land trust holds one parcel of real estate. The elements of a land trust are fairly straightforward: (a) You need to create a trust agreement; (b) to the extent you are using a title company or a bank to manage the land trust, you need to make sure that the trust is open and paid for; and (c) you need to actually fund the trust by transferring in the real estate in question. One of… read more →