Relative Something

Happy day-after-closings day! Yahoo! Except… we only sorta half-closed on each property.

There are a lot of people involved and affected by closing the sale of a home. There are even more than a lot, when closing on the sale of two homes.

If any step of the process gets disrupted for any reason, the number of people needing to communicate with each other is dizzying.

Late in the day on Wednesday, we suddenly learned that the lender to the buyers of our EP home would be unable to close the following morning, as previously scheduled. Cyndie’s amazing ability to think quickly triggered her into action to find a secondary way to cover the down payment on our Wisconsin home, in hopes of keeping that subsequent transaction on schedule.

With that plan in mind, we met yesterday morning with the closing agent and our realtor to pre-sign documents for the sale of our EP home, and establish power of attorney for our realtor to represent us in concluding the closing process once our buyers are finally ready. That was to allow us to proceed to Wisconsin for the second closing appointment, for the purchase of our new home.

While en route, we received a call that there was a flaw with our plan. If we hadn’t officially closed on the sale of our old home, our liability of the 1st mortgage wouldn’t show as paid off, and would cause us to no longer qualify for the loan from our new mortgage company.

That triggered a new barrage of phone calls, back and forth, between 5 or 6 parties involved, each message causing impact on multiple other parties… It becomes rather catastrophic, very fast. Quick-thinking agents with the best of intentions, worked frantically to help us succeed, coming up with potential options, but the more convoluted the path became, the more documents it would require to verify the authenticity of transactions.

The demands were simply impossible to satisfy in the short time available that remained. By the time we identified the stalemate we were ultimately facing, we were sitting in limbo in the parking lot of our new credit union, partway between the home we were leaving, and the one we were hoping to arrive at. We were homeless.

News came through that the sellers of our new home were going to enact the same pre-signing for their sale, as we had done for our sale, earlier that same day. Cyndie and I decided to complete our trip to that town, present them with the gift we had put together for them, and demonstrate that we were ready, and willing, but just not able on that day. Hopefully, we’ll have it all worked out by the end of today.

We knew this was an ambitious plan, but, oy! We had high hopes because everything appeared to have fallen into place. So much for a clean and simple second step.