Selling a Philadelphia Condo – Deliver the Condo Docs Quickly!

In Philadelphia, for a condo transaction, a seller must provide to the buyer all of the condo docs applicable to the condo association.  Once the buyer receives, they have 5 days to review and within that time period, the buyer has the right to terminate the agreement-of-sale.  Thus, it is important to get this information to the buyer EARLY in the deal.

Oftentimes a seller will still have their condo docs which makes it easier.  But other times, you will need to order a new set through the condo association or the management company which will then cost some money, typically a couple of hundred dollars.  In a time crunch, the real estate office may just need to pay for that and get reimbursed from their seller client later.

For example, we just had one recently where the management company took awhile to produce the resale certifcate and the condo docs.  By the time we received it, it was late in the deal.  The buyer decided to terminate the agreement-of-sale over some obscure language in the condo docs.  In reality, it turns out that the buyer told his mortgage company and us that he was buying the condo as an owner occupant but in reality the mortgage company could only do an investor loan as he had just purchased 3 other properties in the last 6 months, which the buyer agent was aware of.  It almost appeared that he was committing fraud but with this provision in the agreement-of-sale, it was his way of slithering out of the agreement.  Slimeball!  Either way, we will sell the property again as that is what we do and we now of course have the condo docs to deliver to the next buyer as we do not have to wait around for the management company to produce.

Where this is even worse is for short sales as often times a seller or a real estate office may be reluctant to pay for those items until there is a short sale approval, but also the longer you wait, the more you give that chance for the buyer to flake on the deal as well.

What are your thoughts?