Deal Diary Part 3: Stress, STRESS, @$#&&%, Close. Aaaaah.

We had a signed purchase contract for $64,500 on May 7, but the deal did not close until June 29. Here's a bullet list of the key elements that went sideways before the deal closed.

- We delivered $1,000 earnest money to the seller's lawyer on May 18. Even though the contract allowed me access to the house as soon as we had a signed agreement, the seller's lawyer wouldn't let my people in until we delivered earnest money. This was the first 11-day delay in a series of delays that happened in this transaction.

- We planned to assign the contract to a rehabber and to do a single closing with him standing in for us, and paying us our wholesale fee simultaneously with the closing. This theoretically saves time and money since there is only one closing. By using this strategy, however, we lost control of the deal.

-The rehabber and his contractors got into the house on May 19. We signed our contract assignment with him on May 20. He has financing through a line of credit that he has worked out with a hedge fund. We did not do our due diligence on his source of funds, however, and the hedge fund placed several conditions on releasing the funds, including two separate appraisals. Since we were butting up against Memorial Day and the end of the month, those appraisals were not completed until early June.

- While we managed the relationship with the seller, the rehabber jumped through hoops with his financing source. We originally scheduled to close on June 15. That stretched to June 22, then June 27, and finally June 29.  We paid an additional $700 to the seller in consideration for the delays. With each additional delay, the seller's attorney became more obstreperous about pulling the deal.

- We were traveling on June 29 to attend to a personal matter. We entrusted the closing to the rehabber. He did a bang-up job, but ultimately our wholesaling fee was run through the closing as well. That was not the original plan (he was going to pay us separately from the closing). The title company and the finance entity became involved with the wholesale side of the transaction. Perhaps not surprisingly, the assignment agreement needed to be amended on Friday afternoon, June 29, while yours truly was in a car 500 miles away.  We got off the highway, found a FedEx Office store, downloaded and printed the amendment, scanned and emailed it back, and much later that day confirmed that the deal has closed.  Our assignment fee hit our bank account on Monday, July 2.

The stress of dealing with delays and waiting for a deal to close while our $1,000 earnest money was at risk within a sequence of events that we did not control was almost overwhelming. I would not do a wholesale deal according to this model again.  In my next and last post about this deal, I'll list all the things I learned in the course of this transaction.