BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

I hope all of you had a good Thanksgiving weekend. My wife, visiting daughter and I drove across Florida to join another daughter and family on the east coast for a very fine time. Believe me, we needed it.

The earlier part of the week was not so good, as I received an email from England and the realtor who advised me that, at the last possible minute, the proposed buyer of our English house, had withdrawn her offer because she discovered, in a surveyor’s report, that an electrical substation servicing a nearby college was located about 75 yards from our house, and she was alarmed by “an adverse health risk”. What a bummer! This substation is located near the bank of garages servicing our series of six town houses. It is a very small substation, contained within a link fence of maybe 20 square feet, I might add.

I pointed out to her in an email that it is not as if a grid of power lines was looming over the house and that the history of this complex is filled with people living into their eighties and nineties; in fact I listed the age of the occupants over the last thirty years in each of the six town houses and no one died less than 80! Of course, this will mean nothing to this silly cow who has a fixed fear in her head. So, back to square one by informing the realtors and getting them back in the hunt for a new buyer. In the meantime, the house is empty, except for a few items the buyer had said she would buy. We could have rented the house furnished temporarily until a sale was made, but now that is out of the question.

English real estate law is similar to ours in that either party can get out before a contract is signed, but in England there is no “earnest money” paid by the buyer at the start but only after exchange of contracts is made. We were in that latter process. And here the resemblance ends. Then in England they put a deposit down and later the full amount. The whole process is unnecessarily laborious and unfair for the seller. So, I’m literally out time and money.

Such is life. You pick up the pieces and carry on.