What are the most common issues during closing?

Title issues are the ones with the longest lead time. The search of the county records can surface a lien, an unpaid tax, an error in a prior deed or a competing claim, and clearing one usually takes weeks, not days. The practice that matters is to open the title early and keep it updated, so a problem found in week two has time to be resolved, while the same problem met in the final week stresses everything after it.

The appraisal and the financing travel on the same clock. The appraised value is an independent figure that the loan is built around, and when it lands below the contract, the buyer either adds cash or the parties renegotiate; a gap discussed with weeks to spare is a conversation, while one met at the end is a crisis. The loan file adds its own late risks, a new credit line, a changed job, a hesitating transfer, so the disciplined buyer keeps the file quiet and supplies the lender's requests the day they arrive.

Repair items and the walkthrough belong together. After the inspection, the agreed repairs or credits are written into the contract with a date, and each repair has to actually be finished and checked. The final walkthrough is that check, and it is where the undone item, the wrong material and the disputed condition all surface. Bringing the inspection list to the walkthrough and verifying the items, one by one, turns the close into a list instead of an argument.

The calendar decides all of the above. Each issue in this list is manageable in a contract that has margin; each is urgent in one that does not. The professional habit is to schedule backward from the closing date: title, appraisal, repairs, walkthrough, with a buffer at each step, so the deal closes because the schedule left room, not because the date got lucky.

Georgia closes through an attorney, and the attorney's calendar is the schedule. The title work runs through the county records, the payoffs are coordinated, the closing documents are reviewed and recorded at settlement, so the closing date is really the date the attorneys and the county records are ready. The parties' job is to feed the attorney the items on time: the title clear, the payoff close, the loan and the buyer's funds.

The Georgia purchase agreement names the structure: a due diligence period with its fee, the inspection period, the financing contingency and the closing date, all written into the contract. The issues that can arise are supposed to live inside that period, where the buyer can inspect, negotiate and, if the agreement allows, withdraw. When something falls outside the period, the answer is not the memory of the parties; it is the document itself.

Georgia keeps the money rules in the contract. The due diligence fee, the earnest deposit and the deadlines around them are agreed in writing, and the outcome, when a property falls out of contract, follows the agreement's terms and Georgia's practices for those funds. That is why everything is put in writing, on time: the clause is the protection and the schedule is the second half of it.

Open the title work on the day the contract is signed, and confirm the schedule for clearing anything it finds. The title commitment is the first document the process produces, and it belongs at the start.

Keep the financing file still: no new credit, no new purchases, no changed jobs once the application is in, and answer every lender request the day it arrives. The last week is the wrong time to run the file through a change.

Turn the inspection report into a dated list: the items that will deliver, the credits agreed, the result the buyer will look for at the walkthrough. The walkthrough then verifies, rather than negotiates.

Put everything in writing and on the calendar. The Georgia agreement carries the deadlines and the money and the rights; the deal is the document, and the schedule is where the document lives.