We moved here from out of state about 9 years ago and went on a few weekend house hunting trips without personally knowing the area. I had picked a realtor from online and she had been sending me homes to view through the computer in order to get our weekend house hunting trips organized. We purchased a home with that realtor, shortly to find out that the house had a huge foundation crack which ran entirely across my living room and had been covered by the carpet. This huge crack had been undisclosed in the sale of our house. We found out that both the seller and realtor knew of this situation and never bothered to list that in the sales contract.
After we found out about this situation from one of the neighbors, everyone on the street started talking about it. So, it was a HUGE secret that everyone was keeping until the homeowner could sell his house. Since we were new to the area, I selected a real estate lawyer from the phone book and hoped for the best. During that time in my life, I didn’t “live” on the internet and didn’t think of a better way to find a lawyer other than the yellow pages. Luckily, our lawyer was great and everything was settled out of court and we were compensated for the undisclosed information on our home.
Now that I browse the internet on a daily basis, I see that I could have found a lawyer or mediator on mediation.com. I”m glad to have found this site, because I have had others ask me for my lawyer’s contact information, but since he is a real estate lawyer, I don’t know that he could help someone out with a divorce as efficiently as a divorce lawyer. My father is an electrician and recently had an issue with a client who was “hiding” from him and not paying him for his electrical work. I talked to my dad about having my lawyer write a letter for him, but then wondered if my lawyer could even help since he wasn’t in the same state. Too bad I couldn’t have used this site to hunt down a local lawyer that could have helped my dad. What was I thinking? I am online most of my day, I should have looked to see if I could have personally found him help instead of referring him to the phone book.