Feb. 22, 2013
My wife and I had just finished signing the papers to buy our first home. We were walking out of the office of the attorney who had handled the closing when he caught up to us with one more document to sign.
It was one page … not a lot of words or complicated legal language. But it didn’t seem right.
It appeared to be a document that favored the seller and would cost us more money. It did not reference anything we had addressed during negotiations or that was in our contract to purchase the home. The attorney explained that it was a formality. “Please sign it,” he said.
Luckily, our Texas REALTOR® was still with us.
We asked for her input. She told us that she had never seen a document like it and that if it were her transaction, she would not sign it.
We politely declined to sign the piece of paper and left.
Looking back, I still don’t know exactly what happened there. Maybe the document was as harmless as the attorney said. Not signing it didn’t seem to have any negative consequences, though.
I do know that I’m glad that we had someone on our side during every step of the homebuying process … even after we thought we were done.
