Suicide and Other Violent Deaths Must Be Declared

Patrick Lagacé, one of La Presse's liveliest columnists, recently had a piece about a West Island couple who were having trouble selling their family home. You can read it here.

In an unimaginable turn of events, their 25-year-old son had committed suicide in the home three years before. They had many visits, but  potential buyers walked away when they learned of the unnatural death.

Quebec is the only jurisdiction in North America where vendors are obliged to disclose when a suicide has taken place in a property. It has been a standard question on the vendor's declaration since 2012.

In Lagacé's opinion this requirement is ridiculous. He hammers away at the fact that ghosts aren't real and don't haunt houses. He does not see why a grieving family should be doubly victimized, first by suicide and again by having their home stigmatized.

The courts disagree and have come down heavily on vendors and brokers who try to whitewash this information.

In 2013, a Superior Court judge cancelled the sale of a $275,000 home and ordered that the vendor pay the buyers $15,000 in moral damages and $23,000 in expenses after the vendor went out of his way to hide a double suicide in the the home he sold them.

The guilty vendor had picked the house up cheap from the estate of the double-suicide couple. He then tried two different listing brokers, both of whom told him the suicide had to be disclosed, before selling the property himself on Du Proprio. He told the buyers that with Du Proprio there was no such thing as a vendor's declaration. (An agent would have told them differently but hey, they thought they were saving money by cutting out the agent. Pffft!)

It did not take long for the buyers to hear about the double suicide from a neighbor. They were devastated. Instead of a first home in which to start their family, they were saddled with a place notorious among the neighbors and wreathed in sadness. They never even moved in.

 Lagacé also pointed to the case of a South Shore real estate agent fined $2,000  after she "minimized" the importance of disclosing such information to a prospective buyer. The home in question might have been the scene of a violent death some 40 years before. It was the home where Quebec Justice Minister Pierre Laporte was held hostage during the October Crisis. Laporte was killed by his FLQ kidnappers but it has never been established whether he was killed in the house.  

Peu importe, the disclosure form also covers violent death and asks whether the vendor is aware of any factors related to the property that might be likely to reduce its value, restrict its use, reduce the revenues it generates or increases the expenses associated with with operating it. (It isn't just about violent death. You would also have to disclose if the house had ever been a brothel, a motorcycle clubhouse, a gambling den...)

To the La Presse columnist the disclosure rule is ridiculous. He falls back on the very logical assertion that "There's no such thing as ghosts."  Case closed.

If only we were Spock-like creatures ruled entirely by logic...

I've twice had to deal with properties touched by suicide. It is true that selling such a home can be a tricky thing requiring tact, empathy and forthrightness.

Columnist Lagacé can assert that ghosts don't exist all he wants. I'm here to tell you firsthand that some people care very much whether there has been a violent or unnatural death in a home.

I sold a home for the estate of a well-regarded professional a few years back. He had lived alone in a nice house in a good neighborhood.Nearly every single person who walked into that house could tell that there was something off about it. There were no outward signs of violence because his death had not been violent. There was a certain sadness that dusted the place.

Each time I disclosed the nature of the vendor's death, people gasped, even took a step back, as though trying to evade the information. I was amazed at how many times I ended up on the sofa, listening to complete strangers share the devastating details of suicides among their own family and friends.

A Vietnamese family, mother and father as well as their adult children, was ready to make an offer but backed out as soon as they heard about the suicide. Death is not necessarily a dealbreaker, the father told me.
 "If an person lived a good life and then died in his own bed of old age, that would be an auspicious death," he explained. Suicide was never auspicious.

Ultimately, I sold the house to another immigrant family. The woman with whom I dealt absorbed the news. She did not care much about the suicide. Her cousin had commited suicide in her 20s, she mentioned. She asked whether I thought the kids of the neighborhood would single out  her kindergarten-aged son because of it? Would they refuse to come over to play?

I told her that I couldn't imagine they would. Kids aren't like that. With time, the stigma of the house would fade. Instead of being the house where Mr. X killed himself, it would become the house where the Y family lived.

Still, when the Y family does decide to sell, they will have to disclose the suicide, too. I can't imagine that anyone will care in 25 years but what I think and what the law says are two different things.

One More Post on Real Estate and Violent Death

A response to my two previous posts on real estate and violent deaths from thoughtful reader Kristian Gravenor:

Nice post, good topic, but I think you're greatly overestimating the issue.

People die in every pre-owned house in a lot of ways. It has no bearing on what happens when you live there.

In the USA there's a hodgepodge of laws from state to state concerning disclosure but I've never found a case in the jugements.qc.ca files of a lawsuit asking for material damages from such a failure to disclose in Kweebeck.

Unless there was a Jim Jones-type body count inside the house I wouldn't be bothered a tiny bit by what happened before.

Yes, but there's a difference between people dying in houses and people dying violently in houses. I learned this lesson first hand a few years ago when I was given the responsibility of selling a home in which the owner had just taken his own life. In this case, the death was not violent, as these things go, but it was an unnatural death. The police and an ambulance were involved. All the neighbors knew what had happened.That raised the potential for neighborhood gossp and conjecture.

It was an interesting experience. The house was fully furnished but quite empty. People had what can only be described as "spidey senses". You could see them trying to put the story of this house together as they walked through. They knew something was a bit off about it.

If I sensed that there was an interest in making an offer, I would sit down and explain the situation. It was amazing the number of times people told me intimate stories of their own experiences with suicide - friends, family members, their struggles with dark thoughts. These are not the kinds of stories you tell complete strangers. Or maybe they are.

The first people who wanted to make an offer on the house were a Vietnamese family, elderly parents, young professional kids. As soon as they heard about the suicide, they said sorry, no thanks. Here's the thing, and it speaks to the point you raise, Kristian. They would not have been bothered by a death in the house. Had an old person died quietly in the house after a long, good life, that would have been auspicious. A violent death was not negotiable.

It took a while, but I sold the house to a family from Iran. The woman with whom I was negotiating had a cousin who took her own life in her early 20s. She had thought long and hard about what makes people kill themselves. Her only question before buying the house was whether kids in the local school yard were going to pick on her son or refuse to play at their house because of that event. I told her I didn't think they would. She bought a good house in a good neighborhood at a good price.

As for whether people go to court over the failure to disclose, you may be right, though I wonder how you would even check such a thing. The other option is that the parties settle out of court most times because if there's been a violent death and the broker hasn't disclosed, the buyer would win, hands down.

So there, you go, Kristian. Thanks for writing. You keep me on my toes.

A Few More Thoughts on On Dream Home as the Scene of a Crime

Yesterday, by pure accident, I stumbled upon an MLS property where the listing broker noted discreetly that the home had been the scene of a suicide. It was mentioned in a note to other agents, not visible to the general public.

I investigated a little further. Yup, the vendor noted the suicide in the vendor's declaration. Here's the interesting part. The suicide occurred before she bought the property. Date and details unknown.  That sent me scampering back through the previous MLS listings for this particular property (What can I say? It was a slow day and I didn't feel like vacuuming. Or folding laundry. Or raking leaves.)
None of the three previous listings mentioned the suicide, either in a note to other agents, or in the vendor's declaration.

It could be the the previous vendor verbally disclosed the suicide to the buyer. It is also possible that the info was written in the declaration but that the declaration was not posted to the MLS site.

I found it curious that the current seller has left an online signpost about the violent death, one that won't be easily erased. From now on, the house's sad history will be there for brokers to see. She gets points for honesty, though I suspect that honesty might make it harder to sell her house.