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The Power of Commitment, Part II
In the first part of this post, we learned that we had a willing buyer and a willing seller… and not much more than that.
We arrived at the scheduled closing date after an 8 month lease option — PLENTY of time to have all our ducks in a row — but we weren’t ready to close. Read the first part of this Lease/Option nightmare, then come back to this post for the finale.
After that first extension was signed giving us another month to get the far-off house closed and the money ready to close on the local Bellingham home…. well…29 more days went by and NOTHING new happened.
The lender working for the buyer of my listing wouldn’t take calls, return calls, return e-mails…nothing. I did succeed in reaching the shady mortgage broker who’d taken an $8000 deposit from the buyer of the far off house, and she had absolutely NOTHING material to tell me. It was like I was dealing with a bunch of drunk stoners or something. If there was anyone in far-off land taking this transaction seriously, I certainly couldn’t find them.
So we signed a 3rd extension. The buyer and the seller were hanging in there. No new fees were charged, no rents were hiked… we just signed an addendum moving out the closing date and extending the lease and all its existing terms, and kept TRYING to get some answers from far-off land.
Then the unthinkable happened. I got some seriously MATERIAL information: The shady lender and her shady partner — her husband — were overridden with guilt from running a shady business and so they both committed suicide. Yeah. Yikes! The buyers’ agent sent me the newspaper story straight from far-off land’s newspaper website. The husband used a shotgun, the wife used pills.
We signed a 4th extension. And STILL the buyer and seller hung in there. Now I KNEW the sale would close. This buyer and seller couldn’t be derailed by anything. Our 8 month lease/option had turned into 12 months, and had every reason to spin apart, but didn’t
We signed a 5th extension as we started to get a trickle of information from the more accessible-but-non-communicative lender. He’d taken over the other loan as well, after the double suicide.
And just one day before we needed to sign a 6th extension… we closed. The far off house closed, and the next day my listing closed. It was the happiest closing I’d ever been part of or witness to. It was cause for celebration.
So when you think you’ve had a rough, drawn-out deal, just remember back to the contingent lease/option that took 5 extensions, a double suicide and a bush plane to get it done… and because of the commitment of the buyer and the seller, it did. It got done!!!
