This was posted on a more active subreddit and I thought I'd share my thoughts:

This nightmare has finally wrapped up and I'm dying to tell someone about it.

My spouse and I were on the market when we stumbled upon a beautiful house in a good school district. Great curb appeal, manicured lawn, spacious shed, it checked all my big boxes.

It was an hour away from my work, but I was convinced I could make it work. It reeked of cigarette ash and the carpet was covered in animal fur and cigarette burns, but I deluded myself into thinking I could DIY anything that could possibly be wrong with this house.

In every possible way, I was totally in love.

We scheduled our final walkthrough two days before closing. The listing agent called 30 minutes before the walkthrough to reschedule. "They're not done moving" she said.

Okay! Weird, but no biggie. We reschedule for the day before closing.

That day comes and we arrive at the home to six cars in the driveway. Three guys are smoking in the livingroom while rearranging furniture. My realtor is absolutely pissed. We walk around for 15 minutes before deciding to reschedule for an hour before closing.

I am undeterred in my optimism while my spouse is totally over it.

We arrive the day of closing to chaos. The garage is jam-packed with their personal items. My realtor tells me that their listing agent has told us to leave or they'd call the police. The sellers, a married couple, start screaming in the room that was meant to be a playroom for my son.

You could hear my heart shatter from a million miles away.

An elderly woman, the mother of one of the sellers, joins in on the arguing before the seller comes out of the house and proclaims that they "ain't signing shit". We leave.

An hour later, they call my agent and ask why we didnt show up to closing. They had signed, so why didn't we? My spouse laughed until he cried. We terminated.

We provided them with an earnest money release form. They asked if we'd split it. We declined and threatened to sue.

We took them to small claims court, which was shockingly easy. The entire process took around two months to wrap up. We served them, they didn't show up, we won by default.

We later closed on a house that checked ALL our boxes, not just the big ones, with zero issues.​

Tl;dr sellers didn't move out on closing day. We terminated. They refused to sign the earnest money release form. We sued. We won.

Edit: We found out later that they were facing foreclosure but managed to sell before that point. Our earnest money was released by the title company 30 days after we provided the judgment, but the seller still owes us in damages. I don't know why they acted like that, but I found a meth charge from a year ago so maybe they were high?

Edit 2: This is so unrelated to my post but it's pretty disheartening that people can't tell the difference between a mediocre retelling of a traumatic event and AI generated garbage. This post would be the former. :/

I love this story.

I don't know how meth addicts act, so I can't speak to that.

But I cannot stand people bluffing. The "we ain't signing" is ridiculous.

People smoking in your living room during a final walkthrough appointment is ridiculous.

The inability to get the home ready for the final walkthrough is ridiculous. The listing agent threatening the cops during a scheduled final walkthrough is ridiculous.

back in my real estate agent days...

To help protect my client's earnest money, when the seller said "if we can't close by this day, it's not happening" (The house had appraisal issues that needed fixing before closing could happen, and they couldn't get the fixes completed in time) we wrote up an addendum that said "extend closing deadline or it's cancelled."

They didn't sign, which triggered a cancellation. The listing agent called and said "why is this cancelled?" and I let him know that we wouldn't be able to close by the date.

This move protected the earnest money deposit.

The sellers and agent took back their words, we rewrote a new contract with a new closing deadline (realistic deadline to get the homes appraisal issues resolved)

But the threats "we aint signing" or "It's not happening" shouldn't be made lightly. It's okay to call the seller's bluff.

It's okay to walk, or to cancel.

Get an agent that will stick up for you and not let you get pushed around by empty threats.

Glad to hear a happy end to the story.

Sam

Originally shared by u/SamTMortgageBroker in r/NewbHomebuyer — view the original thread.