Reply to Buyer losing an earnest money deposit

Forum Index » Real Estate

Reply to "Buyer losing an earnest money deposit - how does it work?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In practice sellers rarely will get the EMD.  The escrow company cannot release the EMD to you without the buyers’ consent.  The buyers, of course, will not consent and will claim they are still working in good faith to make the purchase.  Resolving this via litigation will take at least six months, during which you cannot sell the house a different buyer.  Most sellers are much better off getting home on the market again as quickly as possible rather than pursuing the EMD.

For this reason, a financing contingency waiver is meaningless for the most part.[/quote]

Buyers that cannot get it together to get financing and foolishly committee to a purchase they cannot make with their credit/DTI are not likely to engage in a months-long litigation to get back 5-10k. True the seller also faces litigation costs so they may need to offer a settlement. But nobody in this scenario is going to court so there’s no reason (unless you are a greedy agent) to just give up on the EMD. [/quote]

If memory serves me correctly, the Shifty Sellers thread a few years ago had sellers who didn’t care about litigation and it was discovered they frequently had been sued over the years for all kinds of things so threatening litigation was NBD to them. I think that thread was deleted but it definitely was a cautionary tale about what crazy stuff can go wrong that you would never expect and how some people are just crazy. So it’s no guarantee in this scenario that the buyer will just say “my bad, you can keep it”. Yes, logically that’s how it is supposed to work but it never does. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics