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Comment by kioleanu | Hacker News Reader

I can only comment anecdotally, but my one experience with a German court was weird to say the least: I bought a house from a community of heirs and shortly said, they have falsely disclosed that they were legally prepared to sell the house and the delays until they were ready incured quite some costs, but nothing critical, just a few thousand euros.

I sued to recover the costs and the case got assigned to a high profile judge in the city (don't ask me why, as again we are talking about a few thousand euros), who dismissed the case with, I quote "I also sold a house as part of a community of heirs and we had everything in order and it still took several months, you should have expected this". Completely ignored proof that they lied (in writing) to make me sign the contract and that it took them more than several months just to start the process that then took several months to complete

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I find in general this is the attitude in Germany - if you complain about some needlessly complex bureaucratic procedure here, or even just in general about something that is negative about Germany - people will usually say something along the lines of "But of course it is like this, because X, Y, Z".

I find the attitude in another countries tend to be a bit more reflective and open to criticism - here, everything is the way it is, because.. it is?

Is there a word for this argument? You see it a lot on stack overflow etc too, like "Why do I have to do X" "Because Y requires you to provide this information"

Circular reasoning?

Living in germany for a year now, and holy cow how Germans backwards rationalise so many things this way.

Like wtf, how can the powerhouse of Europe be so thick?

Are you American?

I am not, why?

Because you bothered to take someone to court over something like that. Im not saying its not a shit go by the seller (it is!) but why bother

Because it is thousands of euros lost by fraud?

I don't know the specifics. But I live in an Eastern European EU country. The usual process is the buyer gives 10% of the selling price deposit and specifies the date by when the contract must be completed (usually 3 months). If either party does not honour the contract they pay the fee equal to the ammount of the deposit. This is usually much more than few thousand euros. Moreover the title deeds are publically available. The usual practice is to not hand over any deposit until the buyer is satisfied that the title deeds are all in order.

Interesting, first time i hear about this. Great solution to prevent fraud.

Usually (well, here in Poland) it's around 10% of value, that buyer loses if they change mind but seller have to pay 2x if they back off.

Then usually after signing that you can get the mortgage (at the very least it is much easier if bank gets the papers showing you're in progress of buying home).

After you sign the final deal, you pay and you are then written down (and bank, if you buy with mortgage) into land and mortgage register (which in my language is just called "perpetual book", funnily enough).

There is a bit more complexity when buying some old stuff that might not have entry in the registry, like my grand-grandfather house only have some documents for getting land from government after war and then them giving it to grandchildren few decades ago

> Usually (well, here in Poland) it's around 10% of value, that buyer loses if they change mind but seller have to pay 2x if they back off.

Same procedure in Italy with the difference that there is no mandated amount. Of course the higher it is the less likely is that the seller backs out of the deal.

Taking a bit longer than you thought is many things, but it's not fraud.

The person said:

> they lied (in writing) to make me sign the contract

Lying in order to cause someone else to do something they wouldn't otherwise do is fraud.

Apparently, in this town it's common practice to say, "X is already done" when X hasn't yet been started -- even the judge does it! But it's the town and its standards which are screwed up, not the guy who expected to be told the truth.

(This is all accepting his description of the situation prima facae, of course.)

I was a litle vague on purpose, but this was some time ago, so I can provide some other details I think. Please note that the case presenteted to the judge was about 40 pages long, this is just a very condensed version.

They needed a total of 30 documents and they said they had 28 of them, with the 2 remaining being non-critical and needed just to cover all bases. I analyzed the risks based on this information and acted accordingly with 2 things: one was signing the contract at the notary and the second was taking a bank loan.

The contract was signed with the official representative of the community of heirs and would go into effect after all other heirs have signed it, which was supposed to happen within 2 weeks. After 2 weeks I found out that not all heirs had their inhertiance papers (think 22 of 30 documents actually available) and one of those went no-contact because he had the smallest part and decided the effort isn't worth the money.

After 6 months, since the contract wasn't in effect, I haven't accessed the money from the bank, so the bank started issuing a fine (as per the contract I signed with them) of about 1000 Euros monthly (it's called Bereitstellungsprovision), which went for some months until they got their shit together.

Had I known that they didn't have all documents ready, I would not have entered the contract. Or I could have negotiated with the bank for a longer period to access the money.

That would quality as fraud if the representative knew that the remaining coinheritors would block and if they gained something from the delay (some kickback setup from that back fee? The world we live in is crazy but it's not that crazy). The way you describe it reads as if the inheritor representative might have been just as surprised by the delay. Incompetence, and possibly being on the hook for the bank penalty due to that incompetence (or not, that's far beyond my judicial capability) but certainly not fraud.

Perhaps a more experienced buyer would have added some penalty clause to hedge against the idle money issue (banks don't like a delay between money availability and purchase of the collateral, that's a common issue I think), but since the problem is (was, I hope?) that the contract itself did not happen in time that surely wouldn't be easy (some multi-stage monstrosity, ouch). Unless they lied to get some advantage it can't really be fraud. (and what advantage would it be anyways? If the market price rose during the delay the sellers might even suffer a bigger net loss than that bank penalty ... I guess that would be a way it could become fraud, if they then suddenly refused signing, to sell to a higher bidder, abusing the delay for a safe market bet)

I suspect that this entire class of issues is a common pitfall people who routinely deal with real estate are well aware of, one of the risks kept in check by experience and taking the occasional blow.

That is an almost accurate interpretation. They knew for sure the state of things and were not surprised by the missing documents - this was proven during the pre-trial.

I can only speculate as to why they did it, but I am pretty sure that it was to get the whole process started because some of the heirs were in poor health and they needed to sign the contract sooner rather than later, otherwise they would have entered in a potential loop of heirs dying and having to find the heirs of the heir and so on. So they said, let's start this thing now to minimize that risk and work on the rest of the documents later. From this point of view, they were right, as two people died in the months that followed.

I am also sure that they've hidden the fact because they knew that in this situation, it would have been nearly impossible to find a buyer willing to take part in the risk.

You are right with your remarks about experienced buyers. All in all, I have almost 0 regrets about the whole thing, I learned a lot of stuff in the meantime and got the house eventually

I don't know if you had to pay a deposit, but if you did I think you are really lucky that the owners turned out to be honnest sellers. If you took this approach in Eastern Europe with a property that has many owners of distant relations you would have very likely lost your deposit and courts would be unable to help you. If there are more than two owners (husband and wife) my advice is to pay a lawayer around a 1000eur to see you through the whole legal process.

> That would quality as fraud if the representative knew that the remaining coinheritors would block and if they gained something from the delay

They already gained something - the sale of the property.

> knew that the remaining coinheritors would block

This doesn't matter - they said it was done. This was incorrect. It was fraud...

Your opinion looks like to be you should only sue someone if they rip you off royally, not "just a few thousand euros". I'm not sure from you are from, but in any country you can sue anyone or call the police on them even for an euro or a dollar or whatever the currency is. Fraud is fraud no matter the monetary value.

I think it is quite possible the the buyer didnt do sufficient homework. It is also quite possible that the seller had reasonable grounds to think that everything is in order but got side swiped by German bureocracy. It is also possible that the buyer wanted to take advantage of a simple mistake and started yelling "fraud!". Maybe he would have fared much better had he saught legal advice before entering such a large financial commitment, and saved himself the time and effort of going to court.

that is a truck-load of assumptions

possibilities*

yet accusation of fraud is not an assumption?

I think it's fair to say that an accusation in court is not an assumption, yes.

you must have an assumption in order to have an accusation, what's not clear?

Someone bringing a suit will typically research things quite well and not have assumptions about core elements by the time they file. And sometimes there never was speculation at all. What do you mean "must"?

More to the point, even if you want to call it an assumption a median lawsuit is a lot more thorough than something a commenter guesses offhand as they post. The two are leagues apart whether or not you use the same word.

I don't think you know what assumption means. Let me help you out. He researched an asset so well he decided to purchase it without professional help. When it didnt go to plan he assumed the seller commited fraud. Based on that assumption he took them to court. He then reasearched his case so well that, by the sound of it, the judge laughed him out of the court with a personal anecdote. He then went to HN to bad mouth the judge assuming he is incompetant. So much reasearch. You sound like a professional accuser.

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