No moguling for me.

I'm not talking about skiing - I'm talking about real estate. My big plans of being a two-house-owning mogul are not to be. At least not today.

We were supposed to close on the new house today, but Tuesday night I got a call. There was a "problem" with the title. I only marginally understood what this problem was, and the magnitude of what it would take to fix it, but it all became clear over the course of the next 24 hours.

In a nutshell, an old couple lived in the house a long time. The house was in the wife's name. She died without a will, meaning the house goes to her children. I'm not sure how many she had, but one of them is taking care of Dad now, and at least one other was estranged from the family. He had kids in some other state, and then he up and died, meaning his share then went to his multiple children. No one knows these children or where they are. No one has ever contacted them, say, to have them sign away their share of the ownership of the house. THIS is where it becomes a problem for me.

There are heirs to this house out there. You can't sell someone's inheritance without telling them - not without exposing yourself to a lawsuit. The fact that there are missing heirs means the title has a "cloud." You can't remove the cloud by just selling to someone else and hoping the rightful heirs never find out. You have to find them and have them sign off on the sale and get their share, or you have to go through a court process to clear the title. If I bought the house with the clouded title, and the heirs never found out, I'd *still* have a clouded title when I went to sell. And smart buyers don't buy a property with a clouded title.

I am a smart buyer. Or at least I want to be one. For now, I'm a smart non-buyer. And it sucks, because I was very excited about this house, and it BITES that this happened, and that it happened at the 11th hour. I don't know what the seller will decide to do - find another sucker to buy with a clouded title or suck it up and go through the court process to clear the title. But one thing is certain: I didn't close on the house today, and for now, my deal is dead.

(sigh)

Thank heaven I didn't sell my current house, and expressions of gratitude to the astute title company escrow officer and underwriter who spotted the cloud before I'd signed myself on to something shady. Sometimes bad news is what saves your butt.