What to do when your mortgage is paid off
Q. I am a senior citizen, and I still live in the house my husband and I bought more than 30 years ago. A few months ago I made the last payment on the mortgage. The bank sent me the money left in the escrow account because I'll pay property taxes and insurance myself now. But I still don't have a deed to the house. Shouldn't they send it to me? Once I have it, do I take it to the town hall?
A. The deed to your house has been on file at your county public records office for more than 30 years. If you want a copy, you can order one for a nominal fee. Records of your mortgage are also kept there. What you need now is another document to clear your property's good name so there won't be any hitch if you want to sell it someday.
In most states, the lender acknowledges the payoff of a mortgage with a discharge or release of mortgage, also known as a "satisfaction piece." Some states use a deed of reconveyance instead. The document should be copied and recorded in the county's public records, and the original should be sent back to you.
What's important now is to make sure the discharge is on record. If you don't know how to search the public records online, perhaps you can ask your grandchild (if you have one) or a lawyer to look. Or, you could go down to the office.
Once the document is on file you have nothing to worry about. If it isn't in the records yet, give it a few more months. If it's still not there, then contact the lender, or have your attorney do so.
Q. We have decided to buy our first home. We found a couple homes we like, but when we ask the agents what the owners paid they say they "don't know," or "that detail doesn't make a difference," or they give some excuse and say they'll look it up, but they never get back to us. Can we find that information ourselves?
A. How much the owners paid for the property and how much they need to get out of it in the sale are their concerns, not yours. You may be curious, but that figure has nothing to do with what the house is worth today. If they were given the home as a gift, does that mean they should give it away? And, on the other hand, if they invested $50,000 in a gold-plated bathroom, would the buyers be obliged to reimburse them? Of course not.
When you've house-hunted extensively in a neighborhood, you become an expert on prices of homes in that neighborhood. You can recognize a bargain (and act quickly) when one comes on the market, and you can spot an overpriced property. For a short time, you may know more than anyone else in the world about the true market value of an updated three-bedroom house in that school district.
If those brokers are acting as agents for the sellers, they are legally required to protect the sellers' confidentiality. It's also likely that the agents do not know - or care - what the sellers paid for the property. Any broker who recommends an asking price will do so after considering the current state of the local market, recent nearby sales ("comparables") and other properties that are in competition.
It may be possible to estimate the sellers' price by searching through public records, or perhaps the local Association of Realtors office, but doing so would be a waste of time and effort.
Q. We'd like to comment on the column in which a reader wrote about Realtors who recommend expensive repairs and renovations to up the sale price of a home before putting it on the market.
We recently did some renovations on our home. We contacted an expert broker in our area and she recommended thousands of dollars worth of improvements. Without them, she said, we'd have to sell way below our desired selling price and our home would be slow to move.
We did a few improvements and based our asking price on comparables in our area. Our home sold for our asking price 24 hours after listing it.
A. Congratulations on having the good sense to ignore that broker's advice. I hope you consulted more than one agent and listed the property with a different one.
It's only prudent to clean, tidy, clear out and polish a home if it's going on the market. There are exceptions, but beyond fresh paint, clean carpets and spotless windows, it seldom pays to make expensive last-minute renovations.
• Contact Edith Lank on www.askedith.com, or 240 Hemingway Drive, Rochester NY 14620.
© 2016, Creators Syndicate