Thursday, June 21, 2007

Play Fair!

I've been working with a very nice young couple who are looking to buy their first home. They have done things right. They have excellent credit, good jobs and money in the bank for a down payment. For a realtor, this couple is a dream come true. And to top it all off, they are truly fun to be with.

We start looking at houses and very quickly we find their dream house. But we don't know for sure that it is their dream house, so we spend the next day or so looking at anything remotely interesting. As we sit down to write an offer on our dream house, the listing agent calls to say another offer has come in. We write for more than list price, and long story short, don't get the house.

A few weeks go by. We continue to look at houses. They continue to be fun to work with. We get a call from the listing agent of the Dream House and guess what? Her deal is falling apart. Her buyers can't get financing. She said the deal isn't dead yet but wanted to know if our buyers were still interested.

A couple more weeks go by and we finally get the call saying the deal is dead. So we scurry around, write the offer again, still over the asking price, and submit it that evening. The next day, the listing agent calls to say that she read the offer to the clients and everything is fine but they needed a couple of extra hours because the husband doesn't get home from work till 8 pm. "I'll call you as soon as it is signed off on," were the agent's parting words.

At 9:30 that night, the agent calls to say the sellers accepted the other offer!

What other offer? This doesn't seem fair. Shouldn't we have been told we were competing? I'm still in a state of shock. This was by far, the most difficult real estate call I've ever made and sincerely was choking back tears when I called my clients. And according to my broker, the lack of notification of multiple offers may be unprofessional but not unethical. Pardon my French, but DAMN!

As you can tell from my recent posts, real estate is not being kind to me right now.

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