Page 44 of the title commitment had six of my parking spaces deeded to the building next door

An 18-unit brick walk-up in a first ring suburb, 1.42M asking, 21 striped spaces in the rear lot and a lender who wanted at least one space per unit for the loan to work as quoted.

Schedule B exception 14 referenced a recorded easement from 1987. The commitment described it in one line. I pulled the recorded document from the county, which took two days because that county does not have images online past 2003, and it granted the adjacent 6-unit exclusive use of six spaces in perpetuity, plus a shared maintenance obligation on the lot. The seller's rent roll charged 40 a month for eleven of the twenty-one spaces. Six of those eleven were not his to rent.

So the lot went from 21 usable to 15 on 18 units, and the parking income line lost 2,880 a year. At the cap the broker was using that is around 42k of value. I asked for 47k and a written acknowledgment of the easement.

Seller said no through his broker and told me to close or move on. I sent the recorded instrument and a note saying I would release my earnest money on day 13 if nothing came back. Day 12 they countered at 30k plus a survey they paid for. I took it. The survey mattered more than the money because the striping did not match the easement legal description, and the six spaces in the document are not the six spaces the neighbor has been using for a decade. That is a boundary and prescriptive use question and a real estate attorney in that state has to answer it, which mine did before I closed.

What nearly broke it was my own timeline. I ordered title on day 9 of a 21 day due diligence period because I was busy with a different file. If I had ordered it on day 2 I would have had two weeks to negotiate rather than three days of brinkmanship. Recording practice and how easements are indexed vary by state, so how fast you can get the underlying document is a local question.

Keeping: title ordered the day the contract is signed, and every Schedule B exception pulled and read, not summarized.

2 replies

3samantha_ruizAU4APRO6

The part I would have missed is the rent roll charging for spaces the seller did not own. That is not just a parking income adjustment, it means six tenants have been paying for something that was never deliverable. Did you have to unwind those, and did any of them have it written into the lease? I found my ceiling on exactly this kind of thing, small revenue lines that turn out to be assumptions.

1bmoreno23AB1B

Schedule B was a new one on me, so I looked it up. The title company lists exceptions in one line each and you are expected to go read the actual recorded documents yourself? That feels like the kind of step a first time buyer would assume somebody else was doing.

Page 44 of the title commitment had six of my parking spaces deeded to the building next door

2 replies