Dear Seller: Get a move on

All Rebecca Halbreich wanted was to move into her new house in La Canada Flintridge. Her boxes were packed and ready.

The sellers of the four-bedroom, three-bath home, however, showed no signs of getting out. None of their many artworks or sculptures had been crated. They decided late in the game that they wanted to stay 12 days after escrow closed.

Halbreich couldn’t wait. Her family vacation to Paris loomed; the plane tickets were nonrefundable.

Her three kids kept asking, “Mommy, when are we going to move?” she recalled.

It happens. Escrow closes. The new owners take title, but they can’t get in because the sellers or their tenants refuse to leave.

What’s a buyer to do?

Be flexible, experts advise, and if possible compromise on the move-in date. If that doesn’t work, postpone taking possession until the sellers leave, then go to mediation to recoup any financial losses due to hotel bills, double moves or storage fees. As a last resort, turn to eviction, but count on a lengthy and costly legal process.

It’s not that people don’t know it’s time to go. Standard contracts include deadlines, putting sellers on notice that they must move out and deliver the keys by a certain date, said June Barlow, vice president and general counsel of the California Assn. of Realtors.

Yet delays are common in real estate deals. In Halbreich’s case, she pushed the original close of escrow back two weeks because the buyers of her Malibu house ran into problems. That postponement, she believes, upset the La Canada Flintridge sellers.

Negotiations generally take care of such issues. And, when a seller can’t get out on time, contracts can be amended to include a short-term rental agreement after close of escrow, said the CAR legal expert.

If sellers need more time, Barlow said, “the easy thing to do is make some accommodations.”

If nothing works, disputes go to mediation.

“It doesn’t mean you have to come to an agreement through mediation, but at least you have to try to settle it,” Barlow said.

If that fails, buyers and sellers who agreed to it in the sale contract can take their conflict to arbitration, which is like a mini-trial with a neutral third party making the decision.

Halbreich initially sympathized with her sellers.

“They had lived here for 40 years and raised their four kids here,” she said. “All of a sudden, they’re retiring and moving. I think emotionally, it was too upsetting for them to leave.”

As the frustrating stalemate continued, however, Halbreich became impatient.

“I was leaving for France with the kids, so I wanted to be in,” she said.

The clock ticked.

The sellers held firm.

“How can these people not leave?” Halbreich recalled asking a friend who is an attorney. “He came up with a strategy.”

The day before escrow closed, he wrote to the buyers: “It’s fine if you want to stay. And we understand you’re having problems. But we’re going to hold back $5,000 in escrow and that’s to cover moving Rebecca twice because her stuff will have to go from her old house into a storage unit. And when she gets back from France, you’ll have to pay for a hotel for however many days it takes until the movers are available again to move it out of the storage into the house, and that will give you as much time as you need.”

The sellers didn’t respond.

Escrow closed.

Meanwhile, officials at the escrow company decided to wire all the money to the sellers’ account.

Finally, the sellers moved out and two days before Halbreich was scheduled to leave on vacation, she moved into the house. The sellers, she said, had left the place filthy, the refrigerator, disgusting. The flowers she had admired had been ripped from the ground in the front yard.

Although it wasn’t the happiest of endings, at least she was in and did not have to pursue a lengthy eviction process.

Tom Jensen, a broker with the Los Feliz office of Sotheby’s International Realty, recently represented a woman who had to kick out her brother and sister. She was the trustee of their mother’s estate, and her siblings, accusing her of selling the Silver Lake house out from under them, refused to move.

Meanwhile, Jensen found a buyer willing to accept a 75-day escrow to give the trustee’s relatives additional time to find another place to live.

“After 75 days, these people still hadn’t moved out,” Jensen said. “The relatives kept telling me, ‘We’ll be out on Monday,’ and that went on every Monday from start to finish.”

It took two months to evict them.

Fortunately for the seller, the buyer was patient and willing to extend the escrow.

Jensen’s advice to other sellers in similar positions: Start the eviction process immediately. And be prepared to clean up the trash left behind -- in the case of the Silver Lake home, three truckloads.

Sometimes, even an eviction notice isn’t enough to persuade sellers to vacate -- and take their possessions with them.

“It doesn’t happen that often, but when it does it is really costly to the new buyers,” said Tori Lee.

A Realtor consultant with the Keller Williams Woodland Hills office who trains agents, Lee helped out on such a disastrous situation about 18 months ago.

She worked with a new agent who represented the buyers, a young couple bidding on their first house, a three-bedroom with a bath and a half in Chatsworth.

“We had issues with the seller all along,” she said. He refused to let the inspector in, so that appointment had to be rescheduled, pushing back the close of escrow. The seller also initially refused to permit the termite-exterminators access to the house.

“When escrow closed, he refused to get out. We had to hire an attorney, get an unlawful detainer and serve it. It took 60 days before he would be evicted,” Lee said. “The sheriff had to remove him.”

It didn’t end there.

The seller left living room furniture and lots of clothes.

“All debris and personal property not included in the sale are supposed to be removed by close of escrow,” said Barlow, the legal expert at the state Realtors association. Because that didn’t happen, Lee said, “the buyers had to put his stuff in storage” -- they were legally required to keep the seller’s belongings for three weeks.

Meanwhile, the extra expenses kept piling up. The buyers extended their rental because of the delay getting into their new house. Because the title had transferred, they had to pay the mortgage, as well as the seller’s moving and storage costs. It was a financial strain.

“You don’t have any extra money when you’re buying your first house,” Lee said. The buyers never recovered that money. They were so relieved to get into the house that they didn’t pursue it via mediation.

For sellers who overstay, Halbreich said she would like to see some type of penalty, such as a $1,000 fine either written into the real estate contract, or as a new law.

“I was really lucky to have this friend who is a lawyer,” she said.

Perhaps his letter did spur on the sellers, who left in time for Halbreich to move and still make her plane.

“I knew they’d be leaving,” she said. “It was just the timing that mattered to me.”