Sold!

As of December 18 we are land-owners.

I promised a long and winding road, and indeed it has been. I haven't posted because of increasingly volatile conditions up til December and because the cost of the land was so cheap, we didn't want to run the risk of someone snapping it up from under us.  We'd put in the hard yards to get it all subdivided and legally defined, we wanted to make sure it was ours!

Basically, a surveyor subdivided the land to match about the shape I outlined for you in the last post, making sure the property line was the agreed three meters away from the edge of the owner's terrace and the plot equalled the legislated 800sqm minimum for a building site.

Subsequently we had three lot numbers.

We went to the notary's office in April and agreed to purchase the land by August 15.

Why that date? Well, what we found out was that the owner was late with her mortgage repayment one month and was slapped a 100zł/day fine. Appalled, she decided she would just not pay her mortgage! So the bank decided to calculate what her debt on the properties we wanted to buy would be at her going rate by August 15.

So our notary agreement stated that of the agreed sale amoung, by August 15 we would pay to her creditor, another amount to another creditor (yes, she has multiple loans against the property) and the remainder to her.

However, the catch was that she had to get statements from her banks saying that if her debt was paid - and read not as paid off, but just to get her up to date with her repayments and cover the cost of fines - they would take the mortgage of the three properties we wanted to buy and only be for the remaining five properties created after the subdivision.

Come August 15, we didn't have these documents from her, and without them we were unable to get a loan from a bank for the purchase of our properties!

The clauses in the contract we weren't too stressed that the notary agreement was now outdated, because there was a clause in it saying she could not sell the property to anyone else for 12 months. OK, this is Poland, and such a clause is no guarantee, but we were in constant contact with her and weren't too stressed.

But week after week of "I should get it tomorrow", October rolled around and still nothing, and the situation was getting desperate.

She called us in to discuss.

We now found out that she was so in debt that they were going to cut off her electricity after the weekend and that a bailiff was going to seize some of her property to cover the unpaid taxes (how much financial trouble can one woman get herself in)!

We came to this risky agreement - we would give her a certain amount of cash to cover some of her debts in exchange for her putting our name in place of hers on the deeds. That would make us the owners of the property, but until it was paid off she was the creditor, so it was kind of a win win.

The day after we went to the notary to write up and sign this agreement, social security seized some of her property. We breathed a massive sigh of relief. Our three pieces of land were saved by that clever maneuver! Had we not had the properties in our name, they would have been taken by the bailiff and what bank would have loaned us money for the purchase of land seized by another creditor, and a government one at that!

However with good news came bad... we needed to wait for the courts to formally put our names on the deeds, then we waited, and waited, and waited for the court or local government or heavens knows which authority to make the three subdivided properties into one, with its own number and what not.

That actually took a really long time, but fortunately with the land in our name and finally with statements from the banks with December 16 promises on value of debt to be paid to free up the property from their creditorship, we had what we needed to satisfy the banks that we could get a loan.

We put our loan applications in to a bunch of banks, they took longer than they said they would to go through the paperwork so when one of them offered us a loan, we took it. Of course we would have preferred to wait for the offers to come in and pick the best one, but after two rejections we didn't wait for anymore offers, signed the paper work the next day, and we missed deadline anyway!!!

Fortunately, the creditor didn't charge us or the owner fines for another day's lateness on the repayment - I actually think they were glad to get anything on that loan at all!

And lucky for us, we don't have any more hoops to jump through and nothing else to worry about. They land is ours and the only debt on it is our own, regularly paid 30 year mortgage!