Round 3: Too Dishonest to Be Worth It

By this time, I was tired of seeing houses. This came mostly because I don’t have nearly as strict a set of criteria as Angelee does, so when we’d go see a house that I really thought had potential, she just didn’t have any eyes for it at all. Eventually we came up with a system where she worked with Dustin at getting lists of homes to go see, and then if any were of high potential on her list, I would go see them and we’d decide whether or not to put in an offer

The first home she found using this system she was ecstatic about. She had almost not even taken the time to go see the house, even after they had pulled up and were looking right at it. In the end she went in and immediately fell in love with the interior. She took me to see it that night, and we had an offer sheet drawn up the next day. After nearly a week of drama in counter offers, where we came up 20k from our original offer price and the seller had only come down 3k from asking price (with their agent putting his entire commission toward the sale in order to make it happen), the seller actually signed the Offer Acceptance as well as the Seller’s Disclosure.

Sadly, even getting to this point in the contract, everything fell through. They signed the acceptance on a thursday, but by Monday we were already hearing from the selling agent that they wanted to back out. The seller’s wife called my wife, the seller called me, all in attempts to weave a sob story about how their agent had duped them about the house they were looking to buy. They said if they couldn’t afford the house they were looking at buying, they didn’t want to leave. I was straight with him that I wasn’t going to sue him, but was so frustrated and disappointed that he felt like he could honorably dispose of the contract. I guess a million sorries really are worthless. In the end we agreed on a cash settlement, and they got to keep the house. We once again walked away (mostly) empty handed, mere weeks from owning our first home.

This post is part 3 in a 5 part series. To see the other posts go to the main post entitled My Really Great Family (and our search for a home).