I would be shocked to find someone who has not heard the adage “you get what you pay for”. Yet despite that, the world is full of people who expect Charley’s Steak House quality for McDonald’s price. With today’s economy, price shopping is key to staying within your budget — however, a lower price can often equate to lower quality.
Our office has handled, and continues to handle, many mobile home cooperative transfers. Prior to moving to Florida, I handled hundreds of residential transfers in New Hampshire. I was amazed to see my first Settlement Statement for a Florida mobile home cooperative. The costs seemed high for a transfer of such a small piece of property. However, I soon learned that because of the many moving parts associated with a mobile home cooperative transfer, the closings were very time consuming.
Unlike a standard residential closing where the transfer of property is limited to the real estate, a mobile home cooperative consists of three pieces of property that must be transferred separately – the mobile home, the share in the cooperative association and a real estate interest in the lot on which the mobile sits. The mobile home title itself is transferred at the local Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles’ office. The share is transferred either by the association or its transfer agent and involves cancelling the old share, issuing a new share and updating the corporate records to evidence the transfer. Finally, the real estate portion is transferred through the County Clerk’s office.
This is where the “caution” comes into my cautionary tale. When our office quotes a price to transfer a mobile home cooperative, we quote the price for us to transfer all three pieces of property.
What do I mean by this? Let me give you an example of a horror story that rivals that told in The Exorcist. I recently received a call from a mobile home cooperative owner who was selling his mobile home cooperative. When I quoted him the price, he was stunned and told me the attorney who handled the closing when he purchased the property charged hundreds of dollars less. As I was talking to him, I ran a search of his mobile home title and discovered that not only was the mobile home never transferred from the prior owner to him, but that it had a lien on it from the prior owner. The man was outraged.
As a courtesy, I reviewed his closing package from when he purchased the property and discovered that the reason why the attorney’s fee was so low was because he had only transferred the real estate, period. In the package, I found that after closing, the attorney had sent the buyers to the share transfer agent to handle that portion by themselves, which they did. As to the mobile home, the attorney had the buyer and seller sign a release saying that they were to transfer the mobile home between themselves, which they never did. As a result, the owner had to track down the seller and convince them to not only sign documents necessary to transfer the mobile home title, but contact their lender to get the lien released from the title.
The moral of the story is this — you have the right to close with whatever attorney or title company you wish. However, when price shopping always remember to ask the attorney or title company, “What am I getting for this price?”.