Plans for Rest Of Month/Year

• I wasn't able to move into the house when I was originally expecting to (the 23rd) because the title for the house still hadn't manifested in the mail, and without that I couldn't legally buy the house. The seller claimed she had ordered it from the DMV. The estimated arrival time for the title was 3 weeks.
• Around the 28th, I found out that the title still hadn't shown up, but I let my team know I had no choice but to leave for New York and hope for the best because I was out of days in the apartment I was in in Oregon. I loaded up myself, 2 cats, a dog, and a roommate, and we headed out with a prayer and a half that things would come together or that the seller would allow us to stay in the house until the title arrived.
  • The first time I asked her if I could stay in the house until the title showed, she took over a week to think about it and then responded "Absolutely not."
  • I asked her to reconsider, because we were being forced into a motel while we waited on the title that no one knew where it was or when it was coming. My realtor team asked her nicely, the seller's agent and attorney advised her to let us in. She said no.
• We arrived in New York, and the title still hadn't shown so we booked a motel. My realtor team let me know that the seller's agent was no longer on speaking terms with her because she was being so difficult to work with. I've never actually heard of that happening but I was fuckin' shocked.
  • I spoke to my attorney about options and he recommended issuing a "Time Of The Essence" order, or TOE. It basically says that if the seller doesn't procure the necessary documentation to close the housing deal by X date, then legally I am no longer contractually obligated to keep waiting around and can walk away at any time. Basically, an escape route. I wasn't wanting to use it, but I was hoping it could cover my ass and maybe get the seller to reconsider letting my household into the house that we'd been trying to buy since August 8th
  • About 2 months had passed at this point. The seller had insisted that she wanted a fast sale for the house and so I and everyone else involved pushed and rallied to make it happen in half the time that it normally takes to sell a house. A week prior to our first close date (Sept. 9th) the seller informed everyone that she no longer had the title to the house, which was necessary for the sale, and that she had ordered it in the mail. Which brings us back to the beginning of this saga.
  • Because 2 months had passed, the rate lock for my new mortgage loan was going to expire. Rates were going up like crazy and if we tried to apply for a new one, it would be a hit to my credit and would also leave me with a much higher monthly payment. There was the option to extend the rate lock by 7 days, which would cost $204. If I somehow hadn't closed on the house in that time, I could extend it one more time for 7 days, but that time it would cost $614. I was still holding out hope for the house, so I agreed to the first 7 day extension because "Surely, the title will come any day now!" which my realtor graciously offered to pay out of his own pocket at closing because he was so dumbfounded at the behavior of the seller.
• On a whim my roommate and I decided to drive out to the house and just look at it, see the house with our own eyes that we'd been working so hard to buy. It was covered in bugs. There were at least 2 kinds of wasps, bugs all over it. There was leaking insulation in the foundation. The whole thing was honestly kind of scary to look at and I was horrified.
  • There was also no mailbox. This is a problem because by New York law, when an attorney orders a new title for a house, it is mailed to the address for the title. The house, upon doing a little digging, was not actually visible in the USPS database, and there was no mailbox. Meaning that there was no way for this title to have been delivered at any point over the last few weeks.
  • I called my housing team, furious, and they said to try not to worry about it too much, they'd look into it. They seemed shocked that there was no mailbox, too, and the house being in poor condition only a few weeks after we'd had a showing for it was a big deal.
• My roommate and I head back to our motel, which we'd booked for a week at $650. The motel was horrifying to say the least. Half the lights did not work or were broken, TV was at a cocked angle, there was mold growing in the bathroom between the floor tiles, half the baseboard was just... gone and full of mold where there were tons of fruit flies crawling out of it. We had paid in advance, non-refundable, and we didn't really have a choice but to stay because we literally had nowhere else to go, and the seller refused to let us into the house. We were both so exhausted at this point that rather than trying to fight with the manager about a better room, we ended up buying bleach, bug spray, and a host of other things to make the room more livable.
  • That was my roommate's idea, and I'm so glad that he is so smart because I was a fuckin wreck up until that point. Getting the room at least halfway livable was a game changer for my mental health.
• A week passed, the title still hadn't shown. Our rate was expiring again, and our TOE order expired, meaning legally we could walk away. I call my attorney and have him reach out to the seller and ask her what she wants to do in this situation. I was tired, my roommate was tired, our animals were stressed and getting sick, and there just wasn't anything we could really do here. I wanted to try and communicate with the seller, person-to-person, to see if she was willing to help us out considering this entire situation was.... quite literally her fault. My attorney said he would reach out to her and let us know if he hears anything.
• A few days later I'm still doing my own research on the title and trying to figure out why it hadn't shown up. Roommate and I decide fuck it, let's just go look at the house again, keep our hopes up. Try to keep the dream alive. We got there and saw that there were significantly less bugs, no wasps, the foundation insulation leaks had been scraped off, and there was a shiny new mailbox in the driveway. I got excited and when we got back to the motel, I tried to look up the house in the USPS database (without that, there's no way the USPS would deliver to the house, mailbox or not.) The house was still not in the database.
• I received a call from my lender letting me know that my rate was going to expire the next day, asking what I wanted to do. I still hadn't heard from my attorney and everyone in this situation was getting antsy. I told my lender about the issue and she said "That can't be right, I saw the address in the database myself." so she looks it up while we're on the phone together and it's... not there. After about 15 minutes on the phone of trying to figure out what the fuck happened, we discover that in the listing for the house, there's a discrepancy of the address mentioned. The house was 1007 Newell road on the listing, but legally the house is at 1007 Elwell road. Roommate looked up the Elwell road address and it leads to somewhere miles away from the actual house, a road in the middle of nowhere with no property on it.
  • This meant that, even if the title was ordered for 1007 Newell Road, there won't be anything there. The house does not exist where it legally says it is. Because the seller didn't have the title already, this was now a legal shithole where nobody knew how long it was going to take to get sorted out. We were only allowed a 28 day stay at the motel, max, and it was costing $600+ per week to live there. It was going to cost another $614 to extend my loan, and there wasn't a single guarantee that the title would show in that time.
• Roommate and I made the call to walk away. It was going to cost thousands more dollars to wait and hope that something would show up, or we could take the money we had saved up for the move and try to start over somewhere in New York and try to get our feet back under us. It was fucking heartbreaking but there wasn't anything we could do; I had to make the decision for my household and my family and I wasn't willing to wait around for a maybe when I knew I could pull up my bootstraps and make something happen for myself.
  • At this point, finding another home and closing on it in time would have been impossible. It takes at least 4 weeks to do, and even with our team searching round the clock, I would've had to find a house we were okay with, made an offer, wait days hoping it would be accepted, and then start the whole process all over again with a new rate with a much higher interest percentage, meaning our payments would've been exorbitant. And all of that while staying out of motels, which again were costing $600+ per week, not counting food and animal care and necessities. It was going to cost a minimum of another $2,000 to try and find a new home and we just weren't able to do that, especially when I haven't been able to work in a month because of all of this; my workdesk was currently in storage waiting to be delivered to a house I don't own. We cut our losses. We walked away.
• We toured a townhome, spoke to the property manager, filled out applications, and were approved the same day. During the drive back to the motel, I got a call from my attorney regarding the email I sent about wanting to cancel our contract and walk away from the house. He was upset for us but super happy to hear about the townhome.
  • During this time I asked him "Hey, just for my own info, I never heard back about what the seller had to say about my question asking what she wanted to do. Did she ever respond to that?"
  • He got quiet and then said "She said 'If the deal dies, it dies.'"
  • It still steams me up that she put us through hell all for her and then at the end of the day didn't give two shits about whether or not we were even there. This was honestly just the nail in the coffin.
• Understandably, I'm heartbroken and upset but the new townhome is fine. It's got big bedrooms; it's creaky and the paint is a little dark, but it's livable and that'll work for now. It's a place to get my feet back under me.