ous unhappy buyers and some claims being brought when buyers discover that the actual boundaries of properties they just bought are different than what they thought they were buying. Buyers cannot win a fraud claim against a seller if a survey would have revealed the fraud and the buyer chose not to get a survey.
2>>Change in Possession Date. The previous version of the possession date section
simply provided that, “Seller Retains Possession of Property Through: __________________”. The intent of this provision was that people would always fill in this pro- vision with either the date of closing or a certain num- ber of days from the date of closing. Unfortunately, some people chose to fill in the date of possession with a spe- cific date such as, for example, May 1, 2017. The problem with using a specific date is that if one of the parties uni- laterally extended the date of closing, the transfer of possession was technically before the actual closing.
in which the property is sold “are assigned to Buyer at closing.” This change was made so that if a property owner had property tax appeals ongoing for multiple tax years, the one for the year in which the property was sold would be transferred to the buyer, but not the tax appeals for previous years. This was a logical change because the only beneficiary for the tax appeals in years prior to the sale of the property is the seller rather than the buyer.
4 >>Clarification of the Right to Unilaterally Extend the Closing
The “Closing and Possession” section has always given
a buyer or seller the right to unilaterally extend the clos- ing date for eight days for certain reasons, including the buyer’s mortgage lender not being ready. This is the case even if the transaction started out as an “all cash” transaction and the buyer later decided to obtain a loan. A couple of small changes were made to clarify
Under the new GAR Purchase and Sale Agreement, only pending tax appeals for the year in which the property is sold “are assigned to Buyer at closing.” This change
was made so that if a property owner had property tax appeals ongoing for multiple tax years, the one for the year in which the property was sold would be transferred to the buyer, but not the tax appeals for previous years.
The revised section is written so that it essentially re- quires the possession date to be filled in as either the closing date or within so many days after the closing at a specific time. Therefore, if the date of closing changes, the date of possession automatically changes along with it. This should solve the problem of the possession date inadvertently ending up prior to the date of closing.
3 >>Modification to the Prorations Section Under the old GAR Purchase and Sale Agreement,
any pending property tax appeal was assigned to the Seller at closing. Under the new GAR Purchase and Sale Agreement, only pending tax appeals for the year
14IGEORGIA REALTOR®
that the intent of this section is to allow buyers who purchase the property for “all cash” to get a mortgage loan and be able to unilaterally extend the closing date if the mortgage lender is not ready. There was much discussion among the members of
the GAR Forms Committee this year as to whether this section should be changed. Some committee members argued that if a buyer agreed to buy a property for “all cash”, the buyer should not have the right to unilaterally extend the closing date if the buyer then obtained a mortgage loan and the mortgage lender was not ready to close for some reason. Others argued that in cases in which the buyer contractually agreed to pay “all cash,” the buyers should not be able to unilaterally extend the
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