We closed a purchase in Fairmount, Georgia at one o'clock this afternoon. We were on the buyer's side. On paper it was an ordinary file. In practice, the thing that decided how the last three weeks went was a question about the back yard — and the answer to it came with a sentence that every Georgia buyer should hear before they get to the closing table.
The closing attorney is not your attorney.
It started with a buyer who asked for more than the summary
At the end of August, before anything looked like a problem, our buyer asked for something most buyers never think to request: the complete title history on the property. Not the one-page summary. The whole chain. My teammate Cherry Chang, who carried this file day to day, asked the closing attorney's office for it that same afternoon.
It came back the next day, and it carried something the listing had not mentioned: a question about the landscaping at the back of the property, and whether it actually sat inside the property's boundaries. There was also a proposed landscaping agreement in play.
Nobody had hidden anything. This is simply what a title commitment is for. It is the document that tells you what you are really buying, as opposed to what you walked through on a Saturday.
The sentence worth reading twice
The closing attorney's office gave us three things, and the third one is the one buyers misunderstand.
First, they recommended hiring a surveyor to delineate the property lines and show exactly where the landscaping fell in relation to them. Second, they recommended that the buyer consult an attorney about the proposed landscaping agreement. Third — and they said this plainly — they could not represent the buyer or the seller in a transaction with a lender.
That is not a brush-off. That is Georgia working the way it is designed to work, and it is the single most common misunderstanding I see in closings.
In Georgia, a closing is conducted by an attorney. Almost every buyer meets that attorney, signs a stack of documents in front of them, and walks out assuming that person was looking out for them. In a purchase with a lender, that attorney represents the lender. They will prepare the file correctly, they will handle the title work, they will answer procedural questions, and they will flag a problem when they see one — as they did here. What they will not do is advise you on whether to accept a private agreement about a strip of land at the back of your new yard. They are not permitted to.
So when the title commitment raises a boundary question, the buyer has a decision to make, and nobody in the room is going to make it for them.
What it actually takes to resolve one of these
Here is the honest part: this item stayed open for roughly three weeks. From the day the title commitment landed at the beginning of September until the week of closing, the landscaping question was the live thread in this file. The closing attorney's office followed up on it directly, wanting to know whether the buyer had obtained independent advice before we came to the table. That is the correct question for them to ask, and the fact that it was still being asked in the third week tells you something about how long these take.
Boundary questions do not resolve on a phone call. A surveyor has to go out. The survey has to come back. Somebody has to read it against the title work. If there is an agreement proposed between neighbors or between buyer and seller, somebody who represents the buyer has to look at it. None of those steps is expensive relative to a house. All of them take calendar days that a thirty-day contract does not have spare.
And this was not the only thing moving. The sellers had agreed to repairs, so we were also collecting repair documentation and receipts ahead of the date, and Cherry ran a final walkthrough the day before closing specifically to confirm the work had been done rather than promised. About five days out, the file moved internally from the attorney's pre-closing team to their closing paralegal, which is routine and also the point at which a loose end stops being easy to chase.
It funded on schedule. That is the outcome, and it was not luck.
Five things I would tell any Georgia buyer
- Ask for the full title work, and ask early. Our buyer asked for the complete history at the end of August, not the week of closing. Everything good about how this file ended traces back to that. A title question found in week one is a scheduling problem. The same question found in week four is a closing delay.
- Read the title commitment yourself, or make someone walk you through it line by line. It is the only document in the transaction that describes what you are actually acquiring — easements, agreements, encroachments and all. It is also the one most buyers never open.
- Assume the closing attorney is not representing you, because in a financed purchase they are not. Ask them directly who their client is. A good one will tell you without hesitation, exactly as ours did.
- When a boundary or landscaping question comes up, order the survey immediately. Do not wait to see whether it resolves itself. It will not, and the survey is the only thing that converts an argument into a fact.
- Verify repairs with your own eyes before you sign. A repair receipt tells you somebody was paid. A walkthrough the day before closing tells you the work exists. Those are different claims, and only one of them is checkable.
What a buyer's agent is for
None of the work in this file was glamorous. It was asking for a document nobody asked for, reading it properly, recognizing that a note about landscaping at the back of a lot was a real issue rather than a formality, and then keeping that thread alive through three weeks while the rest of the transaction moved.
The house was never in doubt. The buyer wanted it. The sellers wanted to sell. What was in doubt was whether anyone was going to look closely enough at the back of the property to know what was being conveyed — and in a financed purchase in Georgia, the attorney across the table is not the person who does that for you.
That is the job. If you are buying anywhere in metro Atlanta or north Georgia and you want somebody who reads the title work before it becomes a problem, I work in English and Mandarin and close about a hundred homes a year with Keller Williams Atlanta Partners. Bring your questions.
