Lawyers discover way to get out of contracts to buy houses

So you buy a house and the price of the house has gone down since your bid was accepted. Fine, give up the deposit you placed on the home and move on, right? Well, a couple in NYC wanted to get out of buying the house and to also get their deposit back and thanks to an unintended reading of a 1968 federal law, courts are letting the people do exactly what they want to do. Does anyone wonder what a mess the housing market is with lawyers finding so many ways to get out of contracts?

In May 2008, a few months before the financial industry’s meltdown, the shipping executive Vasilis Bacolitsas signed up to buy a $3.4 million apartment at the Brompton, a luxury condominium tower being built on the Upper East Side.

The building went up as the real estate market went down, and Mr. Bacolitsas and his wife sought a $600,000 reduction in the purchase price. When they did not get it, they decided they did not want the apartment anymore. Their contract, like virtually all real estate contracts, required that they surrender the $510,000 deposit.

But last month, a judge ruled that the couple could walk away with their money. It was one of a series of recent rulings in New York and other states that have enraged developers and given an escape hatch to buyers who signed contracts at the worst possible time, before one of the biggest real estate meltdowns in decades.

The buyers — some wealthy, some not — are successfully using a 1968 federal law intended to protect buyers of out-of-state land from unscrupulous developers or brokers. But in many of these cases, the properties have been built as advertised.

Instead, lawyers for the buyers are finding fault in wording that technically violates the law in contracts or other paperwork — language that few developers or lawyers paid much attention to during the long real estate boom. Lawyers have won back deposits for errors as simple as failing to give buyers a legal description of the property or to register the building with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a basic requirement that many companies nonetheless overlooked. . . .