I mentioned last month that I bought a house in Savannah. I won't go into the reasoning behind doing this but suffice it to say it was the confluence of personal needs and speculative asset management. Perhaps the most shocking thing is that I purchased the house sight unseen. I'll pause while you process the notion of buying a house without seeing. I will note that people I trust did see it and I had seen other homes in the same neighborhood with the same floor plan.
Buying a house is a remarkably outdated process. It's even more ludicrous when it collides with the need to do it remotely. When you buy a house you are handed an inches-thick sheath of documents to sign and initial. It is, oh, 90% boilerplate so you have to try to be smart about what you pick and choose to read. If the law firm doing your closing is good, they will provide you with a cheat sheet about one page long that summarizes all the financial details. That right there tells you that the bulk of what you are doing is busy work left over from decisions designed to keep regulators in their jobs. Presumably these documents are intended to inform you of the details but are so dense and obtuse that you don't read them, you just sign and count on the boiler plate to be irrelevant. Instead of being ignorant, you are ignorant but proclaim you are not.
There are few things that I find more loathsome than regulatory busy work originated by myopic midwits, and that loathing gets worse with each passing year. Honestly, in my senescence I plan on wearing socks and sandals, hitting up McDonalds for breakfast, and griping about goddam bureaucrats to the other seniors at the nearby tables.
Anyway, the upshot of this is the you end up doing stupid and inconvenient things for no reason. To wit: since I was doing all this remotely, I was sent pdfs of documents to sign, with the instructions that they would need an actual ink signature; they couldn't accept a digital one. Then they tell you that you can sign them and scan them and send them back electronically. Um, that's not actual ink. And if it's not actual ink, why can't the signature be digital.
Stop and think about how stupid that is. A thick mass of documents that don't need to be read, need to be signed and initialized in various places by hand, then scanned to send electronically. I cannot for the life of me see what legal safeguards this provides over a digital signature. I mean apart from the inconvenience of finding a printer to generate paper docs, signing, then finding a scanner to import the printed docs -- none of which is, or should be, a common activity in 2022 -- I could have signed the damn things with any signature in the world. Hell I could have signed it Mickey Mouse and no one would have noticed. At that point they are pixels and nothing more -- they guarantee nothing. Yet the mindlessness must be adhered to, because it is just the way things are done and no one ever got in trouble for doing things the way things are done.
You know, Amazon has announced they are getting into the health care business, to quote:
“We think health care is high on the list of experiences that need reinvention… Booking an appointment, waiting weeks or even months to be seen, taking time off work, driving to a clinic, finding a parking spot, waiting in the waiting room then the exam room for what is too often a rushed few minutes with a doctor, then making another trip to a pharmacy – we see lots of opportunity to both improve the quality of the experience and give people back valuable time in their days.”
May I suggest Amazon also turn their attention to residential Real Estate? Many people have legitimate gripes and fears about Amazon, including me on occasion, but one thing they are not is mindless.
*Deep breath*
Another thing that really rustles my jimmies is the home inspection process. Typically when you buy a house you pay for a home inspection service, and they send a supposedly knowledgeable person to the house to find any hidden issues that you might miss in a normal walkthrough. They should do things like try all the switches and faucets; examine the roof, and the exterior; try all the appliances, the heat, the a/c.
In my experience this is pure Kabuki. Both of the houses I've purchased had problems that
would have been revealed had this inspector had actually done the thorough investigation promised. My inclination is that for the next house I purchase (which I hope will be the last) I would skip this. But buying a house is a fearful thing, and you just can pass on the possibility of someone finding something that's amiss. I just wish I knew a way to assure myself of finding an inspector that's worth a damn.
Oh and by the way, the inspector I used misspelled my email address when hand-keying my personal data into his software and could not fathom how to fix it. As a result I had days of delay in communications at critical junctures. He could not figure out that if he just replied to the emails I sent him it would work. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a regulation about requiring email addresses to be hand-keyed.
In any event I now have two homes, although one is at least theoretically an income generating property. Somehow I went from planning on selling my current McMansion and quietly retiring to a little beach shack to adding a second McMansion instead. I can only sigh and hope that just because God laughs at your plans, it doesn't mean he's going to punish you.
