Monday, October 12, 2026

We were in multiple offers. Six of them, all over asking, and my seller calls me at 11pm the night before we're supposed to review and says she can't do it because she found a photo of her dead husband in the garage and now the house feels different. Which I understand, I do, but we had a buyer offering 40k over with no contingencies and she tells me she needs to "sit with it" and I'm thinking okay that's fine people process grief in their own way but then she doesn't answer her phone for three days. Three days. The buyers are calling their agents, the agents are calling me, I'm driving past her house twice a day like some kind of stalker just to see if lights are on. Finally she texts me—texts me—and says she's decided to take it off the market entirely but also could I recommend someone to clean out the garage because she can't go back in there. And I did. I sent her a junk removal guy. Because what else was I going to do. She called me two months later asking if I thought the market was still good and I said yes and she said okay maybe spring then. That was a year ago.

She rejected the offer. Fourth one. Fourth offer in six months on this place, and she rejected it because the buyer's agent used the wrong font in the cover letter. That's what she told me. The font looked cheap. The offer was twelve thousand over asking. This house has been on the market since March. March of last year. We've done three price reductions. I've held nine open houses. Nine. I stopped counting the private showings after twenty because it was making me want to scream into a pillow. The roof is fine. The inspection comes back clean every time. Location is great, schools are good, the kitchen was renovated like five years ago. There is nothing wrong with this house except the person selling it. She called me at eleven thirty last night to ask if I thought the photos made the guest bathroom look too blue. The bathroom is blue. It's painted blue. She painted it blue. Her neighbor's house sold in eight days. Eight days. She brings this up constantly like I'm hiding some secret strategy. I'm not hiding anything. Her neighbor accepted the first reasonable offer. That's the strategy. I have shown this property to people who were ready to write checks on the spot. One couple offered asking price plus covering her closing costs and she said she needed to sleep on it and then never responded to their agent again. My broker asked me yesterday if I wanted to transfer the listing and honestly I should say yes but at this point it feels personal. Like if I quit now she wins somehow. The font. She said the font looked cheap.

The lender called three days before closing. Said the buyer's debt-to-income ratio was off because of a car payment that wasn't on the original application. Buyer swore he disclosed it. Lender swore he didn't. Turns out he'd bought a truck two weeks after getting preapproved. A sixty-thousand-dollar truck. For a boat he also bought. That he also didn't mention. In school they taught us how to calculate loan-to-value ratios and explain amortization schedules. Nobody mentioned you'd spend half your career asking grown adults if they've made any major financial decisions in the last forty-eight hours like you're their parole officer. The seller had already moved to Phoenix. Movers were paid. Keys were packed. We pushed closing back three weeks. Buyer had to sell the boat. Kept the truck though.