Red Tape & HUD homes

There are lit­er­al­ly hun­dreds of thou­sands of HUD homes that have been re-pos­sessed, Remem­ber TARP…

Well it appears that Red Tape is cre­at­ing such a bur­den on those that would like to buy a home that many just veer away from the HUD home buy­ing expe­ri­ence.

Its all because of the Catch 22 red tape marathon that has been devel­oped alleged­ly to dis­cour­age any­one from buy­ing the home.

1. Home Inspec­tion.

In the HUD paper­work they say have the home inspect­ed but because HUD is not direct­ly involved in the man­age­ment of the home until its sold, you end up in a catch 22.

(Util­i­ties…)

If you want to inspect the home cer­ti­fied home inspec­tion is some­thing you real­ly must engage in.

How­ev­er once again its catch 22.

You can­not turn on the util­i­ties with­out per­mis­sion from a field ser­vice com­pa­ny that alleged­ly does incom­plete inspec­tions.

On one hand HUD makes the (para­phrased) state­ment that the MIP repairs they spec­i­fy should not be relied upon for accu­ra­cy, (para­phrased) why is that?  Like­ly because of incom­plete inspec­tions.

Plumb­ing and sew­er prob­lems.

When a home has been sit­ting there for some time it is pos­si­ble that nor­mal­ly func­tion­ing plumb­ing might appear to be dys­func­tion­al.

This is because the seals in faucets and tanks for toi­lets may dur­ing nor­mal oper­a­tion seal up just fine but once those 20 cent seals get dry they are very dif­fi­cult to seal up again.

(it actu­al­ly takes water to suc­cess­ful­ly test out these seals)

How­ev­er, the com­pa­ny that works for the com­pa­ny that works for HUD, does not test out the sys­tem, (they use air) to test out the plumb­ing, which is not a test at all.

The only way you can be sure that a plumb­ing sys­tem is func­tion­al or not is to use water.

The biggest prob­lem here is that the test are not com­plete or objec­tive at all.

They com­press the lines with air, which does not allow for leak­ing seals, so they are not test­ing the lines at all they are test­ing the seals.

Seals are about 20 cents per appli­ance in the home, (appli­ances are toi­lets, faucets, any­thing that has a hand oper­at­ed valve) so they assume that if the pipes do not hold air then they are not func­tion­al.

So, you can’t test out the pipes, (they will not allow it at all)

This is a big prob­lem, why is that?

Sim­ply this if a home buy­er can­not test out the water sup­ply first before pur­chas­ing the home its a prob­lem because they can­not real­ly make a pur­chas­ing deci­sion about the con­di­tion of the home.

Since HUD says that the inspec­tions they per­form may not be relied upon, (trans­la­tion sub­jec­tive tests done by alleged­ly incom­pe­tent field ser­vice agents) yet you can­not do an inspec­tion with­out a ready water sup­ply.

No won­der peo­ple do not want to buy these homes.

It is such a huge prob­lem that no one would want to buy a home with­out any water in it.

On top of that if you want to finance a home, guess what you have to have water to finance the home.

So, once again we see that the TARP deba­cle appears to be a jun­gle of con­tra­dic­tion.

On one hand you have hun­dreds of thou­sands of homes sit­ting there emp­ty and on the oth­er hand you have buy­ers that would like to pur­chase a home and fix it up but they can­not do that because of all the red tape.

Makes you won­der if there might be a need to clean up all this mess and make the process of own­ing a HUD home as easy as they make it appear on their web­site.