Headline:  A homebuyer pulls out just one hour before their closing.  

It seems the seller’s daughter claimed tenant rights and wouldn’t vacate the premises. As a result, they lost their entire downpayment.  Not only is that unimaginable, I’ve since discovered it’s not unusual.  Naturally my first question was:

Can someone pull out of a real estate transaction one hour before the closing?

I’ve just completed my third and fourth closing.  Numbers three and four happened in a day.  We were closing on our house in New Jersey at 9:00 AM then closing on our new place in Philadelphia at 4:00 PM.  Same day.  No wiggle room.  It’s called a contingency sale where the purchase of one property is contingent on the sale of another.  In a mere six hours, several wire transfers had to happen in a specific order with the accuracy of a surgeon.  So the last thing you want to here is your attorney saying:

We’ve got a problem.  

Seems the couple buying the NJ property had a glitch receiving funds to complete their purchase.  This blast of info happened around 4:30 during a frenzy trying to find out what the hell was going on and not getting answers.  The expectation was that precisely at 4:00 PM our lawyer would finalize the final drawdown.  Well she did.  It yielded $0.00 and several gasps.  

A bunch of bizarre thoughts clogged my head:

• Our dogs are in a hotel in Philadelphia and all our belongings are in storage.  
• We have no place to call home though technically the NJ home was still ours.  
• Should we just move back into it and default on the Philadelphia place?  
• We’d already put down over $200,000 and we’d lose all of it.  

To end the suspense things got resolved by 5:30 meaning my stomach was churning for 90 minutes.  Thankfully it was empty.

There was no blame to cast.  It was a glitch, yet the preparatory groundwork for this transaction was extensive on our end.  Turns out the buyer’s attorney dropped the ball.  I wondered if we could we get a discount or at least a food voucher.  

(We got a gift card from our realtor that worked her tail off finding us the right place for us.)  

Here we are once the closing was complete.  Two old men with a roof over their bald heads and one fantastic realtor that had her commission in the bank with a vacation booked.  

And a backdrop of the most aesthetically beautiful city in the USA.  

I look forward to getting to know you Philadelphia.  

After all, there’s no place like home … once you get the keys.