Bits and Pieces of my life

We were days before the closing for selling our house, the owners of the property we were buying had already moved out, so we started moving in. We got a call from the realtor who sold our MN house, and were told that the appraisal on that property had come in low. Both realtors (ours and the buyers) were very mad because it turned out the appraiser had owned a property near ours, and sold it for quite a bit less than we were getting the fall before. Our realtor could see no reason why the house had not appraised out, other than the VA appraiser was being a jerk. The buyer asked to have the closing rescheduled for Monday, giving him time to come up with the $2,000 needed to make up the difference. We found out that the buyer had been given such a run around with the VA financing that he wished he’d never gone that route. My husband wasn’t surprised, and figured if the sale didn’t go through, we’d just put it back on the market and ask more for it. This was the start of the housing boom, and we knew we could ask another $10,000 for the property than we had earlier, and get it too. Since our closing on the buying side had already been postponed, it wouldn’t mess anything up to extend this one a few days, and the buyer was confident he could come up with the money.

It gave us a few more days to move out, and by Saturday afternoon, we loaded up the last of our goods and cats and headed east. The horses would stay at the stable until we got the pasture cleaned up. We already had phone service hooked up at the new place, and had our answering machine plugged in, and had a message waiting for us, but we got busy unloading, and didn’t notice it at first.

As we hauled the last of our belongings into our new home, I remember thinking I didn’t ever want to move again. This was a childhood dream come true, and I would put down roots and stay for ever. It was getting dark out, and I noticed the light blinking on the answering machine. I listened to the message, it was from our WI realtor (we had two because we were buying in WI and selling in MN) and there was a problem about mineral rights and we needed to call her right away.

My husband got real nervous, but I wasn’t worried. I figured the farmers had got together at some point in time and thought up some scheme to sell some rock or something, and that all we needed to do was have them sign off, and we’d be good to go. We had put in our purchase agreement Land and Mineral Rights, so the seller should have known there would be an issue if he hadn’t owned the mineral rights.

We called our realtor; she had left her home number, and got the bad news. The seller had leased the mineral rights to the property 15 years earlier, to a company called Kramer, on a 99 year lease. Those who live in that area may recognize the name, as they were operating several gravel pits in MN and WI. Kramer had already filed plans to start removing lime rock from the property in a few months, and when the survey was filed, Kramer was the one who told the seller that we must be told before the sale could go through.

They expected to be operating the gravel pit for the next five to ten years, and would be blasting and running heavy equipment 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Because of our “mineral rights” clause, we could back out of the deal without any penalty. But were would we go? We had agreed to extend the closing on selling our house so we couldn’t legally back out of that unless the buyer could not come up with the money by Monday, and we didn’t expect that to happen. We could have negotiated a lower price with the sellers, but our country dream did not include an open gravel pit less than 1000 yards from our house. And there was no way we would want to do any improvements to the property with them blasting and running heavy equipment near by.

My husband had worked in road construction/dirt work field for enough years to be familiar with Kramer, and the reality of what we would be facing, and he flatly said “No”.

We brought the kids into our room, and told them of our decision, and the four of us huddled together on the sleeping bag we had laid on the floor and cried. How could this dream, this wonderful dream turn into a nightmare so fast. I won’t dwell on the anguish we went through that night, not knowing where we would go, or what we would do now.

Our realtor worked things out with the owner, and owner agreed to let us rent the place for the summer, while we found somewhere else to live. My husband figured the seller was hoping to keep himself out of a nasty lawsuit. Later we were told that the owner’s realtor and lawyer had both told him he didn’t have to disclose the information about the pit if we weren’t buying land that the pit would actually be on. I don’t know what world they were living in, as one of the questions on the “full disclosure” required in WI real estate sales asks specifically if the seller knows of anything that would be happening on the adjacent properties that could affect the value of the property they were selling. We can only speculate that the reason he was having so much trouble with the survey is that he was trying his darndest to exclude the property he had leased the mineral rights on.

One can only imagine the lawsuits that would have resulted had the sale gone through, and then we’d have found out about the gravel pit. Our realtor, who must have been more conversant with real estate laws, could not believe that the seller’s realtor had actually advised him to hide the information from us. We can only speculate that the main reason he was trying to sell the homestead was because he didn’t want to live next to the gravel pit either.

We did close on selling our MN home the next Monday, put the money in the bank and started our search for a new home all over again.