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.