California realtors put home sellers and home buyers at risk with new buyer incentives
July 16, 2008
The slow housing market in California has prompted some of its realtors to offer a new incentive program to prospective home buyers. Buyers interested in California homes are being offered the opportunity to stay overnight in homes that they have an interest in buying. Realtors say it gives the buyers the opportunity to have a fuller experience of what it would be like to live in the home.
Letting prospective home buyers stay in a home over night is not without risk. If the home was a former meth lab and it is still contaminated, the sleepover “guests” might then turn around and sue the real estate agency and/or the home owner. On the other side of the coin, the sleepover “guests” might use the home to make up their own little batch of meth while they’re there. Who would be responsible to pay for decontaminating the property at that point? The “guests” who may skip town? The realtors? The home owners? The situation sounds like a risky situation to me, for all parties concerned.
Between 1999 and 2007, 11,498 clandestine meth labs were found in the state of California by drug enforcement agents according to DEA reports.
Source: “Sleep on it and in it before buying a home” by Barbara Liston, Reuters
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