Our plan is to move into a new home I’m just uncertain on how all this works and I have been told by multiple people not to rent because it’s a loss.

I have a 12-month lease and if I find a house to buy in the middle of the year, I signed up to "buy back" my lease for 2 months of rent (the other choice I had was to continue paying the rent through the full term of the lease or until the landlord found another tenant to replace me on a new 12-month lease).This type of uncertain living situation comes up all the time with people.

It is very unusual for a seller to try and sue you to have a court compel.There is some less ethical ways add escape language.

@Justin Sandall Borrowing $60k to make an (uncertain) $100/m seems a bit ho hum to me, especially because your finances are already stretched. 

Most of them just pay an extra $100 every couple months to satisfy the water bill.It is nice to have the submeter data to see if one unit is using an unusual amount of water -- helps put the kibosh on leaks and such.

Any unusual closing costs that we should anticipate?

Can you generate unusual secondary rent from someone other than the existing tenant?

I'm in California and do mortgages, but if both Los Angeles and Detroit have an unusual weather event on the same day, it's a good 50/50 coin toss which one I will hear about first (I'd only hear about a Texas or New York or Kentucky weather event on the news), dependent on if I talk to a client/realtor in SoCal, or a mortgage account executive, first, even though I'm on the other side of the country from one of those two locations, and in the same state as the other.Bust follows boom, so no surprise that mass layoffs are going on, but the "baseline" amount of mortgage business is going to be lower than pre-COVID 2019, moving forward.

Is it unusual to pay a $5,000.00 fee for him finding me a house to buy (he says he'll walk me through everything, suggest how to rehab, suggest how to sell, etc).

& I can tell you in no uncertain terms that you are absolutly CORRECT