Reply #16: We had a lawyer read it

[Venceremos]

We paid him $175 an hour to read the contract and make sure everything was okay. He had an excellent reputation and we asked him repeatedly if there was anything wrong with the contract. He said no. Then two weeks after we closed we found out that our neighbor had an easement on our property.

The neighbor owned several acres of land behind the house. He sold the house (but not the acreage) to the guy we bought the house from, and the easement was a stipulation of that sale that also appeared in confusing language in the fine print of our contract. The neighbor had the easement so he could build an access road to the acreage, and it would've allowed him to build the road 10 feet from our house.

Our lawyer didn't say one word about it before we closed on the house. Then after we found out about it he refused to return our phone calls.

The neighbor refused to abandon the easement unless we bought the acreage. So I borrowed the money from my mom and bought the acreage - it was the only way out of the easement.

After that I became a paralegal and now I read every word of every document that I sign. But I still have a great deal of sympathy and understanding for anybody who gets screwed over by a real estate lawyer or mortgage company.