(post by Dee) Only two posts ago, I wrote about the Short Sale that was so close to closing…. Well, the buyer backed out at the last minute. In this sale, the seller being a bank, not an individual (the owners basically walked away from it), the buyer had nothing to lose. Typically, he would lose his deposit for walking away from a transaction this way. He put 10% in earnest deposit – normally, he WOULD NOT just walk away. You can imagine how pissed all the parties were. How about the owners, who thought they were saved from foreclosure and had moved on with their lives seemingly OK? What are we going to tell them? Where do we go from here? The short sale price approval is still in effect for another month. We’ll put it back on the market at this low price and be fine, right!? Yes, yes… but a few things are on my mind. 1. We need to sell fast, before the bank changes their mind. 2. In two weeks, each additional day the bank will deduct $100 from our commission. Ouch! 3. The HOUSE…. Oh yes, the house! Since the owners left a while ago, the bushes in the front yard grew 10 feet tall! Penny savers and junk mail dropped at the door piled up and got soaked by the rain. Plastic bags that drift from all over never get picked out. Inside, the leftover boxes, unwanted items and junk left behind, combined with closed blinds, shut windows and dust balls from behind the removed furniture ALL make the place look very unappealing. As we say it in the business, it ‘does not show well” at all. Who’s going to take care of it? The owner’s wife said she will but by the sound of her broken voice it wasn’t a place she wanted to go back to just to clean up, or to spend money on it. She left in a hurry, thinking that as sad as it was, she was going to be free of the overwhelming debt. Not so fast. Now she has to go back.

I feel terrible, and angry at the damn buyer. But who knows what his situation was. It’s still a beautiful house on the best block. And the price is right. If what it takes is me and my partner cleaning up, that’s what we’ll do.