Thanks @Joe Splitrock, @Doug Pretorius, @John Thedford
It's going to be a double close, and he has no issue with me depositing everything into escrow. And he offered to pay half the closing costs of our transaction, in his words "because we're going to be doing more business together."
A little background, if interested. If not, skip this paragraph. I met him at my local REIA meeting Thursday. We talked a while and even talked a lot more afterwards (a large portion of meeting attendees met at a restaurant after the meeting). He is very knowledgeable and I can tell he has experience, but he admits being a little "rusty" because he's been out of investing for the last 10-15 years due to finding a good job and becoming complacent/lazy. Now, he decided he wants to get back into it (a few months ago) and he knows and works the same areas that I do. At the meeting, he had a deal to push, and he was asking questions about the fact that it has a boiler and what people's opinions were about that. Friday, he told me about the deal in question literally an hour after he got it under contract via email with pics, but no price. I believe that to be true because it's a MUCH better deal than the one he was pushing at the meeting and would have been snatched up right away. I didn't respond to the email, but he called me Saturday morning to tell me I HAD to see this place and that he wanted to give me first dibs before he marketed it to his buyers list, based on the fact that we hit it off pretty good the night of the meeting. Met at the property Sunday afternoon, and I said "I wan't it". We shook hands and he agreed he would cancel his later showings and I would get the deal (but no contract). Maybe the facts that he's "rusty", it was a brand new deal, and he hadn't even put his marketing together yet could be why he wasn't sure how he wanted to close yet? I don't know. I'm a pretty good judge of character and he seems like a straight up guy, but I'm of course trying to be as cautious as I can because I don't know him. (Although, during my amature P.I. work, I found that my cousin knows his wife, but I didn't tell him that, just in case...!)
So, instead of us signing an agreement yesterday, he says his transaction with the buyer is going through title search now at the title company. This brings me to a different question.
I met him yesterday to verify the electricity was working (there was an area outage the first time I went by) and I was also ready to sign a contract because I want to tie the property up. But, as I said, his deal is supposedly with the title company now. He said he has a Purchase Contract for our deal, but he doesn't want himself or me to sign it yet, because he needs to make sure his first deal clears title and everything just to be cautious.
My question(s) : for a double closing, is it possible/legal to have a signed Purchase Agreement between the wholesaler and me BEFORE he even owns the property? Or must he wait until he owns it or, like he said, at least knows the first transaction will have a high probability to close? Could it be him also just trying to be cautions, like he told me? How is this usually done?
