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The Important Role Of Your Real Estate Lawyer

by Marie Caldwell

The real estate purchasing process can be quite challenging to take on alone, which is why it is important to have a team of professionals on your side to help you. One professional that will be extremely valuable is a real estate lawyer, who will help you out with the following tasks during the home-buying process.

Guarantee Earnest Money Protection

It is important that you have protections in place when you are purchasing a home, and your lawyer will help ensure that they are there in any contract that you sign. This is because it is very common to pay earnest money to the seller, which is money that they can hold onto if you walk away from the sale without a good reason. Those reasons for walking away must be spelled out in your contracts or else you'll lose money if you don't want to buy the home.

For example, the very first thing you'll need to do is get a home inspection, which is when someone walks through the home and identifies all the problems with it. What would you do if it was discovered that there was major foundation damage that requires repair? Your contract should allow you to back out of the home purchase and still retain your earnest money. Similar contingencies can exist for the appraisal and mortgage approval, which are things out of your control that can cause a home sale to fall through.

Perform Title Research

Another crucial task when buying a home is to perform a title search. This is the process of researching the history of the home to determine if there is any reason that the seller could not legally transfer the property into your name when the sale is complete. A common problem that can be found is an existing lien on the home, which means another person has the right to the home due to a judgment made against a previous owner. The title search involves looking beyond the current owner as well since there may have been an improper property transfer in the past that was never resolved. 

Read Every Document

The problem with contracts is that there are ways that things need to be stated that only make sense to a lawyer. That's why a real estate attorney should read every document that you have to sign and translates what it means for you. This will help ensure that you understand every document that needs to be signed when purchasing a home. 

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