Tale of Woe

We were supposed to close on our house on August 15th.  Unfortunately, when that day rolled around, our buyers were missing one document.  Apparently, whatever form the IRS was supposed to send in, they sent them a completely blank piece of paper instead.  This caused much worrying amongst us, as we at first thought they'd been sent a blank form-- did this mean they hadn't paid their taxes?  were they illegal immigrants?  What was going on here?  But once we understood that it wasn't a form at all, just blank paper, we figured it was just a silly computer glitch.  We extended the contract another week to give them time to sort that out.

A week went by, and they got the IRS document, but the bank needed a few more days to complete the paper work.  We extended one more week, with the spoken caveat that if they weren't able to close before the end of the month, they were going to pay September's mortgage payment for us.

Thursday night I got a text from my agent saying they were all set to close on Friday at 10:30am.  Huzzah!  She reminded me that I needed to shut off all our utilities, so I spent Friday morning working on that.  Around noon I texted my agent to make sure everything had gone smoothly.  I didn't hear back from her.

When Craig left work a little after four, I told him to call our realtor and see what was going on.  She hadn't heard anything from the buying agent but the title company had told her they hadn't closed.  She had been calling and emailing the buying agent all afternoon with no response, so she was going over to his broker's office to find out what the story was.  When she got there, she learned that one of the co-signers on the loan (the brother of the woman who was actually purchasing our house) had bought himself an $80,000 truck the night before.  And now he no longer had the credit score to take out such a loan.  (The buying agent apparently was dealing with all this by trying to bury his head in the sand.  He tried to claim he didn't know what had happened, but the loan officer assured us that he had known since the night before.  Awesome.)

The poor woman buying the house-- Rosa-- has three kids and was hoping to move in over the weekend.  She was devastated.  And we were pissed.  We all got screwed over by this idiot brother.  Rosa has some other family member (a brother-in-law?) who she thought could co-sign on the loan instead, but that would still mean starting the entire loan application process over again, so we told her no to that, and put the house back on the market at midnight that night.  And we're pocketing the earnest money they offered us (which in hind sight wasn't nearly enough), since they wasted two months of our time (and prime real estate time at that). 

Our agent had an open house today and we've already had five people come and see it.


Here's hoping we'll get another, much better offer very soon.


Hope springs eternal, right?