Is it possible to sell a house or a property with delinquent utilities? Meaning you might have a delinquent water bill, sewer bill, electric, cable, taxes, whatever it might be. Is it still possible to sell your house? And the answer to that question is yes.
You can still sell a house even if you have not paid on the utilities. So how does it work?. If the utility company hasn’t been paid that put a lien/judgement against the property. Meaning, when a title search is done to provide “transferrable title” this delinquent utility bill will show up. The only way for the sale to then go through is if the utility company is paid off, or if you somehow prove that this bill is invalid. The two ways of making the payment would be to pay it outright (using your current funds availible) or by having the title company deduct it from your proceeds upon selling the property.
Breakdown of the Sale Process
So upon us making you an offer and the offer being accepted, we send everything to the title company. So our local title company that we use is Closing and Title Services, they will do a property record search on the utilities, the taxes, any sort of liens or judgments against the property. And that’s what we pay him for, to verify that everything is cleared prior to the sale of the property. So say you have $1,000 in back payments on your mortgage or taxes or utilities that will come out of your closing proceeds upon the sale being finished. So say you were supposed to get $100,000 at closing, but you had $5,000 in back utilities or delinquent utilities or taxes. Essentially you’ll get 95,000 when it’s all said and done because the title company will pay off those delinquent utilities or taxes.
It’s fairly simple to sell a property with delinquent utilities, but this is just something that you need to be aware of so you’re not surprised when it comes to closing time and you have a line item on the closing statement for delinquent utilities $5000. It is because the title company will pay them off. They’ll make sure that everything is cleared.
Now if you want to receive an as is cash offer for your property and possibly even have opportunity to have renting it back after closing, feel free to give us a call on our office line, which is (920) 215-4201 or fill out the form down below on this page and we’ll get ahold of you right away. Thanks so much and have a great day.