Things you can and can’t take from a house you are selling. Episode #195

Hello! Welcome to Todd Miller TV. Wanted to do an update today for buyers and sellers to talk about what you can and can’t take form the house when you’re selling the house. So somebody hit come on the blog and they were searching for like, “can I take the ceiling fan?” right? So I’m gonna give you some general guidelines for what you can and can’t take. Now first of all, if you wanna know exactly, it should be one or two things. One is, read the purchase agreement. And it should in there everything that you/is staying with the house or not. That would be like you know, purchase agreement. The other thing would be, Talk to an attorney and find out what the law says. Now, as general practice of Real Estate, anything that’s permanently affixed that’s meant to stay with the house as an improvement to the house, you can’t take. For example, the doors inside the house. The door knobs, the ceiling fans, the oven, like the/like an oven in a house, even if it’s the one that sits on the floor and just plugged in to the gas, that’s meant to stay. Blinds, Curtains, you know, some curtains, curtains maybe of grain area but most curtains are custom fit for a window and you can’t really take ’em, they’re not just gonna fit any other window. Some things that you should probably take unless it’s negotiated otherwise, for example washer and dryer. Generally they’re considered personal property because, yeah they’re sitting on the ground, they’re hooked up and not necessarily considered a fixture a lot of times. Refrigerator, unless it’s a built in fridge. If you have a built in fridge, and then people come by and look at the house and go “Oh, we love this built in fridge” and then you rip it off the wall, you probably gonna have some problems with that afterwards. I’ll give you an example, So a few years ago I had a client and they had a book case, just a regular book case. And they has set it against the wall, and when they set it against the wall, the baseboard behind it, you know, it wasn’t flushed against the wall,so they cut the baseboard out and they saved a piece, and they put the piece on the garage and they pushed this big book case against the wall. Well they had this, they had a baby, when the baby start walking the baby would grab on the book case. They were afraid the baby would pull the book case over on to herself. So what they did is they put a screw in it and screwed it into the wall to keep it from falling over. So, people came to buy the house and when hey moved out, they took the baseboard, they removed the bookcase, they took the baseboard and put it back on the ground, and the buyers were very upset. They thought it was a built in book case, it was screwed into the wall, it looks like you know the, we even saw that the baseboard was cut to and it fit perfectly. And we said, “well, does it fit to this general rule?” The method of the attachment and the intent, so how as it attached and what was the intent of it, was it intended to stay there? And when we explained, that the reason why the baseboard was cut was because it would flush against the wall. And the reason it was screwed in, is ’cause just didn’t want a small child to pull it over. They said “Okay, we get it now that we don’t think they’ll try to do anything that furious”. So, Landscaping, don’t take the landscaping. If you have something in the house like perfect example this happen, a ceiling fan. It had with this really fancy looking ceiling fan, it was like bamboo and it was pretty looking. And they said it was a gift from somebody so we’re taking it. So we get to the house there was no ceiling fans at all. And the buyers were very upset, they said it was part of the sale, they never said they were taking it, and they’re thing is we paid for that separately or whatever. So, to resolve any disputes, here’ a very good rule to follow: If the seller’s moved out of the house, you’re gonna do a walk through a couple of days before the close of Escrow. Be very diligent walking through the house. If you see something that’s wrong, like hey took that and they shouldn’t have, don’t close escrow. Go to Escrow and say until this, we get compensated for this or whatever, you know, you can do that, you have that power, that’s what the walk through is for, to make sure the house is in the right condition after they’ve moved out. You can own, you can negotiate all of this. If that doesn’t work you mediate it etc. But just wanted to give you some ideas of some things you can and can’t take form a house and/Anyway, that was my update for today and hope to see you on another video. Thanks!

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