Life is so full of coincidences. A few days a month I instruct learners in the new Agent Licencing course and yesterday was one of those days. At the end of class one of the students, a gentleman my age (who (here's another coincidence) who happens to be the father of another agent whom I taught a few years back) comes up to me and relates the story of a transaction he thought he would complete without a REALTOR some years back to save some money. Of course you know where this is going.

Well, before I get to the story, a little preamble first. This morning as I decided to write a blog article about his experience, I logged into Linked In and there was an article posted by another top-notch commercial REALTOR I work with (Ahmed Assaf who is also a commercial mortgage broker www.excelcommercial.ca) about another nasty story involving a businessperson trying to complete a transaction without a REALTOR - and this was a commercial lease transaction.

You can read the article at  http://tinyurl.com/7qjyvv5 and feel free to join our group "Edmonton Commercial Real Estate Network" on Linked In for updates on article of interest to commercial real estate buyers, sellers, landlords and tenants.

But back to our story.

Now this was only a residential transaction but the story is the same. An individual wanted to buy his home so he agreed to sell it to him and so they entered into an agreement. The agreement was unconditional so it was final, a done deal, a fait accompli so to speak. Or not.

The buyer was a wealthy individual and decided he wanted to get out of the transaction. To make this happen is pretty difficult in an unconditional contract situation. Or not. Contract law can be very complicated and the English language with over 600,000 word variations doesn't help. As it turns out there was a civic compliance issue with the property and the buyer used this as his ticket out.

Now my learner didn't ever tell me the final outcome but he did tell me that he spent ten years in court over it. Ten years! Think about that. No doubt it cost him a ton of money also, but anyone who has spent years in a legal scenario will tell you the time lost is far more painful than the money lost.

The moral of any story involving our legal system is that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. As professional REALTORS we use contracts drawn up by the best real estate lawyers in Canada to deal with just these types of scenarios. Any time another party wants to introduce a different contract into the mix (which is very very common in commercial real estate) we always review and between me and the lawyer, we suggest numerous changes.

So what is the moral? Use a professional. Time and time again the story is always the same.

I just wanted to save a buck.