Carragee Consulting

I was supposed eSign the Settlement Statement for my upcoming Townhouse sale and I found three errors totaling $896 in the net to seller amount.

I also switched my phone and Internet service from ($80+110/month) to $50/month combined.

Pricing strategy and maximizing your sale price gets a lot of attention in real estate, but price execution and collecting all the proceeds you negotiated gets almost no focus.

Real estate transactions are still loaded with fees from documentation preparation, notaries and legal fees, to taxes and loans. Some of these are negotiable and you can competitively shop for them, and some you just have to pony up.

The three errors I found were:
$493 – wrong commercial loan payoff amount

$327- prepayment for a water bill I’d already paid

$76 – property taxes and assessments listed as both a combined line item and double counted by listing it out separately too

It’s possible that some of this overpayment would have come back to my LLC as account credits eventually, but it would have caused even more administrative burden to fix the books and correctly calculate sale proceeds with the restatements.

I didn’t have a robust process to catch these errors, I manually recalculated the fields and references several PDFs and websites to validate each value and the summation.

I almost signed the form without double checking it because I want to sales to go through, but I thought trust but verify.

Conclusions
– strategy and execution are at least equals in the profit game
– attention to detail and validation systems are important in any size business
– no one cares as much about your business as you do