A certified check puts all the risk on the person receiving it. In the case of real estate transactions where the people controlling the transaction are motivated to get paid I can see why they'd be uninterested!A certified check, even one that must be procured in a laborious manner as the one you described, has no risk for a purchaser. The same isn’t the case for a wire.
On the other hand the last time I bought a house I wrote a personal check at closing. The lawyer for the finance company controlling how the paperwork got done said in advance it would be fine and that they had plenty of recourse if I'd bounced a check on them, and that a bank check wasn't really any higher risk. (That strikes me as a little sketchy, since either way there's a deliberate fraud risk but at least with the bank check there's no NSF risk, but hey, their rules.)
I bought a car once and the seller wanted a certified check. I was like "okayyyy......" and went and got one, and after we did the paperwork and I went home (to come back in a couple of days with plates to drive it home), he took the check to his bank and then he called me in a panic saying the bank had no idea if the check would clear. No kidding, dude, that's why I was going to bring cash! I'd feel a little less snide about it if the guy wasn't a very high-profile lawyer with some claims to expertise in financial matters. (To his credit, he said that he had set the terms and that he wasn't going to try to get in the way of me taking the car but he really wanted some reassurance. I gave him the check details and pointed him at my bank and they provided it.)
Statistics: Posted by glitchy — Wed Aug 07, 2024 12:40 pm