WHAT “AS IS” MEANS
You want to sell your house but you do not want to fix anything that might come up in the home inspection. This is understandable if you have reduced the price to where the buyer is getting a real deal. Why should you have to fix a bunch of stuff. Some people will tell you to list it for sale AS IS. This is not good advice.
In the MLS right now you can find a bunch of homes listed for sale "as is". The sellers think they are letting the buyers know up front what they have to deal with. Some agents list all their homes this way. The problem is the message being sent by the seller is not the message heard by the buyer. The buyer interprets "as is" to mean there is something major wrong with the house and the seller is not disclosing it.
The net effect is it scares buyers away. The last thing you want to do in this market is scare buyers before they even see your house. With the way the contract is written in NC there is no reason for a seller to list their house for sale as is.
The Purchase Offer that is used in North Carolina allows the seller to fix the problems or not. If the home inspection comes back requiring structural or mechanical repairs it is the sellers choice to fix the problem, reduce the purchase price by the cost of fixing the problem or let the buyers out of the contract. So there is no need for a seller to worry that they will have to repair things they don't want to.
However, if structural or mechanical repairs are necessary and the seller opts to not fix them and let the buyer out of the contract, then the seller and his agent must disclose these problems to any future buyers. Once a problem is discovered it becomes a material fact.
For the buyer, "AS IS" means that if the home inspector finds out that it would be cheaper to tear the house down than fix it the buyer still has to buy it or forfeit their earnest money. No buyer is going to enter into a deal like that unless you are giving the house away. If you advertise the sale AS IS then you will scare away buyers.
A research paper just came out where a professor studied 20,000 house sales and found that a house listed for sale "as is" sold for less and took longer to sell than comparable houses.
