Trouble at the Last Mile

July 9th, 2008

Bad news.

Upon presenting the seller with our proposed Purchase and Sale Agreement, the seller called me and told me his accepting of our price was with the understanding that there would be no real estate commission paid out of the proceeds. It is customary for the seller to pay all real estate commissions so my agent and I just assumed that while he would be paying no sell-side commission, he would still be picking up my agent’s commission. In a deal of this size, that’s kind of a lot of money.

The seller is an honest guy and I’m sure this was just an honest misunderstanding, but if I were to pick up my agent’s commission, it would put me above my “100% comfortable” price.

After a long jog to think about it, I called the seller up and essentially told him we could argue for hours about it, or we could walk away, or we could just split the difference. I offered to split the difference and he said he was probably ok with that but he needed to run it by his siblings first.

Hopefully splitting the difference gets us across the finish line. Yet another sleepless night coming up…

One Response to “Trouble at the Last Mile”

  1. Andy Borgmann Says:

    Hopefully splitting the difference gets us across the finish line. Yet another sleepless night coming up…

    Ohh how I remember that feeling.

    #1 - September 5th, 2008 at 10:15 am