Real Estate Transactions Attorney in Oakdale, Minnesota

Deceived in Property Purchase

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The first thing you do is you look at your purchase agreement. You find out if you agreed to arbitrate that dispute with the sellers of your property. Most real estate transactions have an arbitration clause and most clients that I see have been encouraged to sign it. So you need to know if you’re in arbitration. You also need to understand your deadlines; usually those arbitrations have deadlines that you have to bring your claim within 18 months or two years from the date of your closing. Then you need to figure out how you’re going to prove your claim. A non-disclosure claim is like a fraud claim. You really have to prove the seller’s knowledge before they sold it to you that it was material to your property ownership and that you didn’t know about it. And those are higher levels of proof than one would think. Usually when we’ve been successful in those claims and we’ve had some really nice multi six figure awards on non-disclosure claims, we have a neighbor or we have a former tenant or a former owner or another lawsuit that we can use to show the seller’s knowledge. It’s not enough to assume they know. Somebody can walk into a house and have it start raining that same day but unless you can prove that that happened when the sellers owned it, you’re out of luck.

Oakdale, MN construction litigation and insurance coverage attorney, Brenda Sauro, talks about what you can do if deceived in a purchase in real estate.

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