What does a buyer want his real-estate lawyer to do? This is a great article published on Land Think. In the article author Curtis Seltzer encourages "buyers to find --and get comfortable with -- a lawyer as one of their first steps in looking for property in a particular county. " He also lists a few ways a lawyer can help a buyer before a contract is signed:
1. Reasonableness of asking price: Don't expect a lawyer to do a comp analysis or an appraisal. But local lawyers who have been doing real-estate work for a number of years should have an accurate feel for prices, price trends, volatility and current market conditions. Buyers often get a better bead on the reasonableness of a seller's asking price from their lawyer than from an agent representing the seller who may be their first and only source of local market information.
2. Local insight into seller's motivations: Lawyers know their communities, and usually know personally, or know of, individual sellers. Buyers are enormously advantaged when they can learn why a buyer is selling and how intense the motivation is.
3. Problems and issues with particular properties: An experienced local lawyer is likely to know first-hand, or have acquaintance with, many properties in a county, particularly those that have been sold during his years of practice. The more years of practice, the more likely it is that he will know about problems and issues that may or may not be of a strictly legal nature.
4. Lenders and vendors. The buyer's lawyer will also have opinions about local lenders, brokers, agents, title companies, surveyors, excavators, local officials (building inspector, zoning office), appraisers and contractors. If this advice is sound, it's worth
a small fortune to a buyer who will be directed to the best local options for each service.
It can save a buyer money, time, aggravation and mistakes.
5. Contract terms. Most buyers are shown property by an agent representing the seller and given a standard purchase-offer contract that, in my opinion, is skewed in favor of sellers. A buyer's lawyer should be asked to go over either the standard agent's contract or one the lawyer uses well in advance of a buyer having to read and understand contract terms under pressure. Previous columns have discussed many of these boiler-plate terms and their implications.
6. Local idiosyncrasies: The buyer's lawyer should know something about local politics; local folks and neighborhoods to avoid; and local ground conditions (such as, which areas of the county have dirt that rarely passes a perc test, routinely flood, get lightning strikes, are situated over karst, go dry in August and so on). (To read the complete article
click here.)
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