The Brad Hole

Our home search seems to have come to an unusual resolution. One of the houses we were interested in last week (and lost the same day) fell out of escrow and essentially into our laps. This past Thursday, the listing agent called our realtor (remembering our interest) and offered to not relist the home for a few hours while we came and looked at it again. Beth took a long lunch and we hauled ourselves up there again - another 40-minute-each-way drive. At least it's mostly freeway miles. :-)

We ended up making an offer and signing a contract with the stipulation that they had to either accept or reject the contract by 7pm Thursday night. Well, it turns out that the husband signed it by 7pm but his wife wasn't home by then, so their realtor was going to get the signed contract back to our realtor Friday morning sometime. Apparently the wife forgot (or did she?) to sign it Thursday night so it wasn't ready Friday morning. The last I heard was that our realtor was supposed to get a faxed copy last night once the wife got home again. We were out so I'll call him later this morning to see if it's official or if it's turned into crap.

We're kinda prepared for some jack-assery with this house. To remind you, this was the "first mad dash" from last Wednesday night - the one where we were scheduled to stop by between 6 and 6:30pm only to be told at 6:15 and half a mile away that it was gone. Knowing this, and knowing that there was some disagreement that caused the previous offer to fall apart, it would not surprise me to discover that these sellers are a large part of the problem. Because this is such a sellers' market, I'd like to limit the number of times we get bent over and screwed to once or twice a month. ;-)

Edit: Good news for us - the wife of the seller signed the contract last night and everything is now official. My understanding is that now we've got 10 days to complete a number of inspections, so that process will start in earnest on Monday. w00t!