Close of escrow for 1 week; home has major sewer line; should seller pay for it

[Sara Siri]

Hi,

We just purchased a home and closed the escrow recently. We moved in 3 days after closing. After living there for 2 days, there was a major sewer line issue. Both toilets and both bath tubs were also clogged (the house has 2 bathrooms ).

We hired a plumber to hydrojet (via the back of wash/dryer). He said the force was 2100 psi (sorry if this is not the right unit; it's a technical term which i'm not familiar). It couldn't go through. It went only so far and got stuck. The plumber said we needed a clean out. In the mean time, my real estate agent who helped us with the purchase of this home suggested that us to contact a home warranty. The plumber from a home warranty came and said he couldn't do anything because we didn't have a clean out. We called the 3rd plumber and he evaluated the situation similar to both plumbers.

This was the tree roots problem. So the 3 professionals said we need a clean out. They would do a video analysis and then clean it. If the pipe was compromised, they will have to replace the pipe which it was the case too. The quote was roughly the same from the 3 which is between $4000-$5000.

We have communicated this issue to the seller via the agents of both sides. The seller response was that they said a similar issue back 10 years ago when they purchased this home. Their plumber just hydrojetted the pipe and it worked afterward. They were willing to pay for $150 for hydrojetting.

We had no water for almost 2 days so we decided to hire the 1st plumber due to his good reputation and we paid $4000 after all. Our agent agreed that this should be seller's responsibility since the roots have been there years and years and if seller were to have regular maintenance, it should not cost this much to fix the problem.

I would like to get your thoughts on this issue if we should pursue things further as legal action. How much money/ time should I be expected to pay if we go the legal route? Do you think it's seller's responsibility.

Much appreciated your input. Thank you

Sara

[Jon Holdman]

I doubt you have any case against the seller.  Did you do a sewer scoping on the line before purchase?  That's become standard practice around here.  And when the problems are found (very common here for certain ages of properties) then, as buyer, you negotiate with the seller to get it paid for.

But if you didn't do your due diligence up front and pursue this with the seller before you closed I suspect you're out of luck.  You would need to prove that the seller was aware of the issue and failed to disclose it to you.

Hopefully you actually got the line replaced if you spent $4000.  That's a reasonable price if the line wasn't too deep or too long.   In the past few years I've done three of these at similar prices.