The house that had to leave

I almost deleted that email

In February 2023, I received an email from a woman I did not know.

It looked exactly like the kind of email that usually gets sent to many people at once: a foreign name, a general message, an unusual request and no recommendation from anyone familiar. It would have been easy to delete it before even understanding what the sender wanted.

I replied.

That is how I got a client with whom, over the next year and a half, we completed three completely different transactions.

Of course, none of that was visible in the first email.

The message was more or less this: we want to sell our tiny house.

The house was located not far from Tallinn. About 37 square metres of living space, plus another 13 square metres of terrace. A modern modular structure with large windows, a kitchen, a bathroom and everything needed for living.

The owners had lived in it for about a year and a half. With a child and pets.

And they wanted to sell it by the end of May.

At first, the request sounded like a normal sale of a small house.

Only quite soon it became clear that the land plot was not part of the transaction.

Only the house itself was for sale.

The next question was much more complicated than finding a buyer: how do you sell a house that physically stands on land, but is legally sold separately from it?

The house that was not real estate

The house could be divided into four modules, loaded onto special transport and moved to another location.

From the outside, it looked like a proper home. People lived there. There was furniture, water, electricity and heating.

But for the purpose of the transaction, this was not classic real estate with an entry in the land register. It was movable property.

The first task was not even to find a buyer, but to define exactly what we were selling and how it should be documented.

Was a notary needed?

Who owned the structure?

Which documents proved where it came from?

What was included in the price?

Could the buyer start dismantling it before full payment?

Who would be responsible for damage during transport?

A normal ad saying “house for sale” could have created more problems than inquiries.

First I needed proper access to the object.

The owners were in the middle of moving and could not come to every viewing. Their personal belongings were still inside, and using random phone photos for a serious sale made no sense.

I needed to get into the house myself, inspect it, understand the layout, take photos and be able to organise viewings.

We agreed on handing over the keys.

After the meeting, I received plans, technical materials and the original producer documents.

It turned out that the house was being sold with the kitchen, sanitary equipment, boiler, heating, appliances and part of the furniture.

The deeper I went into the documents, the less it looked like a simple tiny house from a pretty photo.

It was a proper structure with requirements for the base, humidity, heating, flat roof and maintenance of wooden elements.

The buyer had to understand that they were not buying a decorative little house that could simply be placed anywhere. After transport, it had to be installed professionally, connected properly and used correctly.

Now the object had to be brought to the market. And unexpectedly, one of the most difficult questions was the ordinary address.

How to advertise a house without an address

The next unexpected issue was the address.

The house physically stood on a specific plot. But the plot was not for sale.

If we put the exact address in the listing without explaining the situation, some buyers would assume that the price included the land.

If we hid the location completely, the listing would look suspicious.

We had to find a compromise: show the area, show the surroundings, but state very clearly that the object for sale was a modular house that had to be moved.

At the same time, VAT came up.

We had to clarify whether the sellers were private individuals or a company, whether tax was included in the price and whether the buyer might face an additional cost already at contract stage.

We checked the documents and confirmed that the sellers were acting as private individuals. No additional VAT was added to the price.

For an ordinary portal visitor, this was one line in the listing.

To prepare that one line, we had to understand the purchase history and the documents for the house.

Because the object was unusual, a percentage-based commission was also inconvenient. We agreed on a fixed fee of 2,250 euros. Everyone understood the scope of work and knew the cost in advance.

The listing went live.

The buyer did not appear immediately.

When an interested person finally came along, it seemed that the difficult part was over. In reality, that was when the real negotiations began.

A buyer appeared and went directly to the owner

At the end of April, the owners told me that an interested buyer had contacted them.

He had viewed the house and offered 30,000 euros.

At first glance, this was good news.

Only after the viewing, the buyer decided to continue negotiations directly with the owner.

This happens sometimes. A person gets access to an object through the work of a broker, meets the seller and then decides that the broker is no longer needed.

The problem was not only the commission.

At that point, the parties had agreed only on the price.

Everything else was still open:

— who was buying the house: an individual or a company;

— which equipment and items were included;

— who would pay for transport;

— when dismantling could begin;

— by what date the house had to leave the plot;

— when the keys would be handed over;

— what would happen if the buyer paid part of the price, started dismantling the structure and then failed to pay the rest.

I had to bring the transaction back into one clear process, collect the details of both parties and start preparing the contract.

The buyer turned out to be a company. That also had to be entered correctly in the documents: company name, registry code, representative and authority to sign.

One of the email addresses did not work. The message bounced back as undelivered. By phone, the buyer answered irregularly.

I had to look for an alternative address, resend materials and at the same time explain to the sellers that silence did not yet mean the transaction was off.

Sometimes negotiations in real estate do not rest on a complicated legal structure, but on whether someone manages to find a working Gmail address.

When contact was finally restored, a new conflict appeared. The parties had agreed on the price, but they imagined the payment schedule very differently.

Fifteen versus thirty

The main conflict was the payment schedule.

The buyer wanted to pay 15% after signing the contract and 85% later.

The seller proposed 30/70.

On paper, it looked like an argument about percentages.

In reality, the parties were discussing who would take the main risk.

The buyer did not want to transfer almost the whole amount in advance for a house that still stood on someone else’s land.

The seller did not want the buyer to start dismantling the structure, pay only a small part of the price and then change their mind.

After several emails, the seller agreed to the 15/85 structure, but with one clear condition: the full amount had to be received before any work on the house could begin.

The keys would be handed over only after full payment.

That already looked like a workable compromise.

It only had to be written properly.

The first draft of the contract looked fine. Until we started checking the payment, handover and removal dates at the same time.

A contract for a house that had to disappear

The first draft of the contract looked fine until we started checking the dates carefully.

In one place it said that the house had to be removed by the end of May.

In another, it said that the final payment could be made in June, but no later than three days before transport.

It was impossible to meet both conditions at once.

The seller noticed the contradiction. We corrected the deadlines and separately agreed on a 500-euro penalty for delayed removal.

We also decided to attach the original producer documents and technical description to the contract.

The wording “modular house” was not enough.

Both parties had to understand the object in the same way: the structure, terrace, kitchen, sanitary equipment, heating, appliances and built-in elements.

Several points also had to be separated, although in a normal transaction they often happen almost at the same time:

— ownership transferred after full payment;

— physical handover took place by handover act;

— keys were handed over only after the full amount had arrived;

— transport was fully organised and paid for by the buyer;

— the risk of damage had to be connected to the moment of physical handover.

In the end, the contract became a sales agreement, payment instruction and evacuation plan for the house all at once.

The transaction closed in June.

I represented the seller at the handover. We signed the act, listed the items that remained inside and handed over four keys to the buyer.

After that, the house was dismantled into modules and taken away from the plot.

For me, this was the first transaction where, after the sale, the object literally disappeared from its former address.

It seemed the story was over.

But the client came back.

This time, we had to sell land. I thought that after a house that had to be moved, a plot would definitely be easier.

I was wrong.

Continued in “The land that was more complicated than the house”.