Q: We bought our first house two months ago and signed an “as-is” contract. After the first heavy rain, water poured in around a bedroom window. When we pulled up the new laminate, we found the subfloor was already rotted and had been painted over. The sellers must have known. Do we have any recourse, or did we give that up when we agreed to buy the home as-is? — Marcus

A: An “as-is” clause is one of the more misunderstood provisions in a real estate contract.

It does not mean the seller can hide problems from you. It means the seller is not agreeing to make repairs before closing, and that you are accepting the property in its current condition. It does not give the seller permission to conceal a defect they already knew about.

These are two separate ideas, and the difference matters in your situation.

When you buy a home, you are responsible for defects you could have discovered by looking, and an as-is contract increases that responsibility. A worn roof, a visible crack, or an aging water heater are the sorts of things a buyer is expected to notice or uncover through an inspection.

A seller does not necessarily have to tell you about every issue you could reasonably find on your own. They cannot actively conceal or lie about a serious problem they knew about.

Covering rotted wood with new laminate is not a repair the seller chose not to make. It is concealment, and concealment is not protected by an as-is clause.

The difficulty in these cases is usually not the law but the proof.

To recover, you will need to show that the sellers knew about the rotted subfloor and took steps to hide it, or at least failed to disclose the issue to you, knowing that you couldn’t look under the laminate, rather than simply having missed it themselves.

That evidence is often available. Building permits, the contractor who performed the work, prior insurance claims, photographs, and the sellers’ own words or actions can all help establish what they knew. If they signed a disclosure form stating that there were no known defects while new flooring sat over rotted wood, that document will be valuable to you.

The key point is that agreeing to buy the home as-is did not automatically waive your rights. You gave up the right to complain about conditions you could have seen for yourself, but not the protection against being deceived.

Because claims like these are time-sensitive, you should act promptly. Photograph the damage before you repair anything, ask a contractor to provide a written statement that the problem was old and had been covered up, and locate the disclosure statement in your closing file. With that in hand, have an experienced real estate attorney review your documents and advise you on the next steps.

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