All Forum Posts by: Deborah Beeksma

Charlie,

I sure understand about lightening strikes! That's a whole other story in and of itself....To keep it short, I had lightening hit my house when I was on the phone and it melted the phone, my computer's wiring, and some wiring in other applicances. If I had not been wearing tennis shoes, I doubt I'd be here today. The experience of being enveloped in lightening is a whole other topic!

Anyway, you can sign up for free for k7 at www.k7.net. If your computer gets fried from lightening, you can always access k7.net's online storage center using someone else's computer.

The messages are saved on k7.net's website for a limited time and there are some other restrictions, such as you need to receive a certain amount of faxes per month for your free service to continue. In the member area, you can have your faxes sent to your email (they come in an image file that's attached to your email). Although they've been sent by email, the faxes are also stored on k7.net. There's also a voice mail option, which is nice if you're traveling and want to access your voice mail over the Internet.

My email fax messages always come from K7.net, so I've set up my Outlook to sort any messages from k7 into a "fax" folder.

I've been using this service for over 5 years. One of the things I love about it is that I tend to get buried alive with paperwork and will misplace a printed fax or other document. Since these faxes come by email, I save all of my "fax email' except the spam. I can reprint the fax if I've lost it, which has been great. Also, if I am traveling on business and need to retrieve a fax, I can just log in to k7 and pull the document.

When you get faxes by email, you can also convert the fax image into an Adobe Acrobat file if you have the Adobe software. I've used this for distribution of legal documents...

It can't hurt to try it out, since it's free.

Deborah

Great stuff! Thanks for the humor.

:D

I've used k7 for years now and have never had a problem. The faxes can come by email, so that way I have them saved by date for future use in case I lose the printout.

Quite frankly, I've used paid computer fax services before and k7, which is free, has proven to be more reliable for me.

Deborah

I want to thank everyone who responded to this. I got some good feedback...one of the main things was to slice up the video into segments to create faster download time, which I did.

The brokers and realtors had great feedback and felt that this is something their buyers and fellow realtors need to look at. One realtor asked that I expand this into various basic real estate topics for pre-licensing brokers and the general buying public.

In my 20 + years of real estate work, I have seen so many people hurt legally, financially and emotionally by not understanding the documents that they are signing. If you are new to buying property, you can take watch the video for just a buck by PM'ing me within the next 24 hours.

Otherwise, I just wanted to thank everyone for their invaluable feedback!

Deborah

If this is something that people are interested in, I could interview some attorneys, brokers and developers and put something together. I work as a paralegal-consultant for various lawfirms and companies. In the last development I was involved with, there was SO MUCH red tape that the developer lost over half of his pre-sales because of the time it was taking to get mundane things approved from local and state government.

The problem with this subject is that the laws vary from state to state, so I am not sure if a "blanket" type of book could be created on this subject.

Deborah

Ericthelight,

You need to take Ohio Realtor's advice seriously. The only other option I can think of is to wait until the listing agreement expires and then go with a FSBO if the personal representative of the estate allows it and/or your parents want to go that route. In the meantime, it seems to me that your best option is to work something out with your folks.

Deborah

It sounds like you'll need to do a bit of market research before jumping in and read through some of the posts here.

I happen to live in a small town that is listed in MSN's emerging top 10 'Places to Buy a Second Home" and so people are doing very well with investments and flips in this area. However, if you are in a depressed rural community, you may have a rough time.

Deborah

So, so true!

Was there an appraisal of the house? The appraisal should have given accurate data.

Depending on your state's disclosure requirements, the seller may have been obligated to provide an accurate square footage description. If there is an aspect of this sale that did not meet with disclosure requirements, there's a possibility that you might have recourse. Of course, this is all dependent on your state law and the verbiage of the contract(s) that you signed.

Deborah

You might want to check your State's statutes to find out what types of liens are permitted and under what circumstances they can be filed. I don't think you can just arbitrarily file a lien on someone's property.

I was working on a well agreement today and needed to find out what authorities the well users would have to file a lien against a defaulting well user who was not paying his share of the operating and maintenance costs. What I initially thought would be simple turned into a complex issue that took me a couple of hours to research.

Most State statutes are available online...run a search for "lien" within your State's online legal reference to make sure you are complying with the law before filing a lien against someone's property. If in doubt, talking with an attorney may save you time, money and grief in the long haul.

Deborah

First thing I would do is check to see if he is asking more than fair market value. Equally important, I would personally talk to a Realtor and explain the situation. A Realtor can be very helpful and may be able to negotiate a deal a bit better because he or she may not be as emotionally vested in the situation as you might be.

Deborah