Boy the stories I hear. Many real estate investors do whatever it takes to move fast from the close of their real estate investment, through the flip process and on to listing the property and a quick close. Get in, get out and maximize profits. Sounds good, doesn’t it. If it were only that easy.

True story, I am working with a buyer who is buying a house from experienced real estate flippers. In fact, this group of investors buys a lot of homes. I’m told last year they flipped over 45 homes in this county. So you would think they had seen and been through everything? Well you would be wrong if you thought that.

In the county that the subject property is in in California, there is a local ordinance that almost held up our deal. My buyer was doing all cash with a quick 20 day close. We did the inspections. The property has a pool. Come to find out, the county requires the seller to have the pool certified. This entails an inspection of the safety of the pool, the surroundings and the safety of some small person coming into the backyard and NOT drowning in the pool. Actually, it is a pretty involved process. Best part is, no one can agree who is supposed to certify the pool. The local code enforcement department says the home or pool inspector can. The home and pool inspector says no thanks. So back to the county who now says sure fine, but not if all other permits for the property are not signed off on. Did I mention this is a flip?

So what to do. Well, I came up with an out of the box idea. As a representative of the buyer, use this opportunity to negotiate. Which we did. Say hello to a new pool fence of my buyers choosing. Because we needed to wait 7 days extra for the fence to arrive and be installed, the investor was very happy to extend closing a few days so they could get certified and we got the fence we want and not what they wanted to throw up. Not only that, we were able to get some other safety issues resolved in the process.

So the lesson here is to verify with your Realtor or County Code Enforcement Agency if there are any local ordinances that may have an effect on the quick close of your real estate investment.

You can thank me later.