Edit: Thank you all for your opinions! Yes, we knew even before this that our realtor was awesome. This will be the third transaction she’s helped us with (buying house #1 years ago, selling house #1 a few weeks ago, and buying house #2 now). We’ve also recommended her to several friends/coworkers.

Original post:

To start with, we have already given up on this one and are under contract for another house that we actually like better. The answer doesn’t really matter, I’m just curious.

The story:

House came on the market on a Friday. We (potential buyers) had a private showing Saturday morning. Overall, the house looks great. Oddly, the listing says furnace, AC, roof, flooring all new in the last 5 years. But furnace and AC both have service stickers from 2010.

Considering writing an offer, have our agent reach out to seller’s agent with questions.

From seller’s agent: Seller was having a “senior moment”. AC and furnace aren’t new. Honest mistake. Editing MLS listing now. Also, house is “As-Is”, and seller wants a 60 day free rent back after closing.

Us (buyers): at our agents suggestion, offer list price with an escalation clause. Inspection contingency, but understanding that seller won’t fix anything we find. 20 day rent back (we were already under contract for selling our current house and didn’t want to move twice)

Buyer counters: $5k over asking (the extra will help him move out faster) and we cover any appraisal gap.

This seriously pissed off our agent. She says (in our market) asking for appraisal gap coverage when there are no other offers is unheard of. She suggests telling him yes on the price, no on the gap.

But we really want the house and have the extra cash to cover a pretty big gap. We ask the agent what she thinks about limiting the appraisal gap coverage to 10k.

Agent suggests a 5k gap. We counter with that (and the 5k over asking that the seller wanted)

Buyer comes back with $6500 gap coverage.

Now realtor is really pissed and thinks we should walk. Says if he’s being this unreasonable now, we can expect that at every stage of the process. Wonders if the furnace/AC thing was actually an honest mistake or intentionally lying to his agent, and whether he knows something else is wrong with the house that will lower the appraised value.

But we want the house. So we submit our same counter again (5k over, 5k appraisal gap).

Seller walks, even with no other offers (even though this whole process took about 4 days)

Agent says this is a blessing in disguise because he would have been a nightmare to work with.

House has now been on the market for 2 weeks (a long time for our market). Agent keeps saying she’s waiting for his agent to call back and ask if we’re still interested, so she can tell them that we aren’t a she blew his chance.

So… is the seller really that unreasonable, or is our agent overreacting?