Hi BP!
I have an interesting situation that involves 2 sellers. I currently live in an awesome midcentury style duplex as a renter and would like to purchase the property. There is a lot of potential for the house to be a house hack with the other unit rented out and converting the garage into an ADU effectively allowing us to live for free in a HCOL area. The house itself is an art piece and has some non-emergency deferred maintenance so will likely have to amortize that over time. There are a couple of wrinkles that I would love to get folks' perspectives on to make sure I'm not missing anything for the purchase. This will get relatively detailed as there is a settlement tied to divorce case that has just concluded for 3-5 years for the couple (awful, drawn out case for both sides).
Stakeholders:
Wife (main bread winner)
Husband (stay a home dad)
Me (current tenant)
Background of Case and Situation:
Divorce case that started over 5 years ago. Wife has been trying to settle and sell the house to pay for lawyer fees (racked up over $300k between them two). Husband has been blocking the sale for years trying to purchase himself but doesn't have the funds. Ended up settling last week where they need to choose a broker in a week, and put the house for sale on the market in around 2 months and wife has to give extra $ from the sale to husband in exchange for cancelling alimony.
After the settlement, the wife and I sat down to go over the case outcome and she indicated that she would issue me a 60 notice to vacate but is non enforceable given our 1 year lease that will end next June. She has mentioned that part of the settlement agreement states that she needs us to vacate and if we don't, she might be at risk of opening the case all over again which she is deathly afraid of. After reading the docs, I only saw that she needed to issue me a notice to vacate vs. actually having me out so not sure if that was 100% truthful (trying to figure out why she would lie about it or if I read that wrong). During our discussion, she also tried to flip me to month to month multiple times which I declined as there was no benefit for me. I mentioned that I would be interested in purchasing the house which the wife is open , but she believe will have trouble convincing the husband if she suggests it as he would decline anything she proposes given the feud (both need to sign off on sale). She suggested that I could bring it up with the husband (he's my neighbor at the duplex) so it seems like it's not coming from her. We have a window of around 1 week from today to do a direct deal or they will be signing a broker to be on the deal given settlement agreement. I currently have a cordial relationship with the husband but also don't want to show all my cards. Benefit of doing a direct deal is that I don't have competition and that there would be no broker fee which the sellers and I could split. However, there is a lot of repairs that will need to be negotiated (potentially 30% of the purchase price) and wonder if I push too hard, if they would take it out to the market.
Current Interests of Each Party:
Wife - wants to maximize purchase price as she has a lot of lawyer fees, she wants a quick close. She's afraid that if we don't move after 60 days of giving us the notice, her settlement will fall through and she would need to reopen the case and spend more $. I'm unclear if that's true still because from the documents I read, she only needs to issue me a notice. One potential scenario is that she's afraid that I will drive away buyers given I'm living in the unit until June of next year with my lease, or that I would scare them off by saying I'm already in talks of buying it. The house is going as is and the inspection report will show a decent amount of yellow flags that could potentially scare buyers. She wants ease of transaction so would prefer to sell to us at a fair price because we're already there and easy to deal with.
Husband - don't know much about him but seems like he wants to maximize purchase price and potentially get more from the wife if he could. He also has emotional attachment to the house and would potentially want to continue renting the front unit.
Us - I would like to purchase the property for as good of price as possible given high mortgage rates, hopefully backing out broker fees if I go direct, backing out repair costs, then eventually building out the house so I can house hack it and live there for the foreseeable future.
Know it's a lot but would appreciate any thoughts here! Trying to figure out what I should do over the next week.
