Another thing I don't understand....

When a offer is made to buy a house, earnest money is given to the realtor to show the seriousness of the offer.  If the offer  is accepted, both parties sign the purchase agreement.

If the buyer changes his mind and wants to break the agreement, then the sellers will receive the earnest money as a payment for a broken contract and the possibility of another offer being made.

On Wednesday, Oct. 24, a couple made an offer on our house west of Pulaski.  We accepted that offer.  A purchase agreement was sent to us via email, which we signed digitally that afternoon.

On Thursday, October 25, they contacted their realtor and wanted out of the agreement.  They claimed that they found a large piece of wood close to the downstairs bedroom windows that was crawling was live termites and they wanted no part of the buying the house.  They wanted out and they wanted us to sign a release form.

On Friday Gary went to the house.  There is no large piece of wood close to the bedroom window, which we already knew.  There were landscape timbers at the front of the house, behind the garage, and along the sunroom.  Those have been in place for nearly 30 years and are rotting.  There may have been some bugs in them, but there were no termites.  Gary said we would not sign the release, especially since in the purchase agreement they specified no inspection and said also that we didn't have to clean out any other trash that we wanted to pitch.

On Tuesday evening Wendy called and said that she had talked to her boss and he recommended that we sign the release.  He felt that if we didn't, they would continue to find other things to use to try to break the contract.  To do this they would be returning to the property and looking around without permission (as they did earlier) and without contacting either agent.  We didn't want that.  Also Wendy said that as long as we didn't sign the release, no other offers could be made or accepted which would NOT be in our best interest.

So we said we would sign the release.  When she sent it to us on Wednesday to sign, the date on the release and on the buyers' signatures was October 25.  The day after we signed the purchase agreement.

The whole scenario sounds strange to me.  Why did they make an offer and then want to back out of it so quickly?  Were they not serious about it?  Were they expecting us to  refuse the offer and panicked when we did? 

That is one thing I don't understand.

The other is that there is no earnest money coming to us.  Why?  Because they didn't pay the money to their realtor at the time they made the offer.  He didn't collect any so he can't give it to us.

The only way we could collect the money is to take them to court, which would cost more than the $1000 by the time we pay for an attorney to represent us, and which would prevent any other offers to be made on the house.

That just doesn't seem right to me.  When we bought this house, we gave the check to the our realtor and we wouldn't have done it any other way.  We are honest people.  At least I think we are!

In the long run there are now several lessons we have learned.

One is that we will not sign another purchase agreement unless we know the earnest money has been paid.

Another is that we will not do business with the realtor that neglected to collect the earnest money from the buyers.

A third is that we will call Terminex to inspect the house for termites and eliminate that problem, if one does exist.

Better safe than sorry, right?