Imagine the beginning of a classic horror movie - a young (or not so young) couple arrives to look at an old house and, completely oblivious to the disturbing music playing in the background, signs all the papers. And then the actual plot begins...
Okay, and what if the customers didn’t like something and refused to buy it? You will say that then the whole movie wouldn’t have existed, and you’ll be right. But, according to real estate agents from this viral online thread, there have been many stories when a deal to buy a house fell through at the very last moment due to some petty whim of the buyers.
More info: Reddit
#1
How about our bizarre reason for buying a house? We were looking in the Bay Area and our five-year old son fell in love with one house because the people selling it had two little boys about his age. Our son thought it meant he would get two brothers. The people were so charmed by his misunderstanding that they decided we would make good owners. Their children actually left our son their outgrown toys to have something to remember them by. In the hot competitive housing market at the time, it really worked out well.
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198points
#2
Spent around two months looking for a property with a couple. They barely qualified for what they were looking for, so each offer was a battle just to get it reviewed.
Finally found a house that had a willing seller, good listing agent, and it checked all but one box. That box?
The guest bathroom had a shower curtain the wife didn't like.
Seriously. Not a glass door or anything permanent but a removable curtain held up by those bars you twist into place. I even offered to buy them a $200 gift card for Home Depot or Bed Bath and Beyond to help them find something different. Nope. That curtain [ended] the whole thing for the wife.
Needless to say, I fired them as clients immediately after that.
181points
#3
I knew someone who didn't buy a house because it had too many closets. Other than that, they thought the house was perfect.
After a moment of stunned silence I suggested they buy the house and close some closet doors and just not use the closet(s).
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134points
In this list, collected for you by Bored Panda, there are stories for literally every taste - from completely crazy situations when buyers left the deal for a reason that looked incredibly petty in the eyes of the realtor, to fierce disputes between spouses, where both sides flung arguments, and only at the last moment the deal fell through. It’s likely that if Netflix decided to make a series about the everyday life of real estate agents, it would be an undeniable hit.
#4
Former Realtor here. Had a couple that wanted to live in a specific neighborhood and wanted a rectangular pool with a small pool house and covered patio. There were exactly 3 houses in the neighborhood that met these requirements. I spoke with all 3 owners and one said they would sell and they were generous on their pricing.
Why, you ask, did the couple decide not to buy? The house next door was yellow.
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123points
#5
Sort of related. My wife and I looked at buying a house and the owners said that the 12 chickens in the garden coop came with the property. I laughed and said fine - we'll just eat roast chicken for the first 12 weeks we live here.
They refused to sell the house to us.
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121points
#6
I didn’t buy a house once because the realtor was a dips**t. The house was perfect except for one thing. In the kitchen there was a crack in the middle of the granite. When my wife pointed it out, the realtor told us “it raises the value of the home because that’s unique and considered art. No other home will have that crack” and he did NOT say it in a joking manner. For that dumba*s statement, we left and didn’t buy the home.
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107points
“In fact, there’s another fairly logical reason why the deal could fall through,” says Yulia Shurinova, a real estate agent from Odessa, Ukraine, with whom Bored Panda got in touch for a comment here. “It is quite possible that the buyer has already chosen another property and came to look at this house simply, as they say, ‘to clear their conscience.’ And at the same time they don’t want to upset the seller and agent with a direct refusal.”
“At least in my practice and the practice of my colleagues, there were many similar cases - and we learned about the true motives of the buyers in retrospect, when the deal to purchase another property had already been signed. And sometimes the buyers themselves admitted this later. Somehow no matter what, I believe that some of the stories told here also have precisely this background,” Yulia ponders.
#7
When we were house hunting my husband and I found a listing for a duplex unit at 69B Jay St. Unfortunately it wasn't the right fit for us, but I hope whoever picked it up is making the most of their raunchy new address.
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103points
#8
Not a realtor, but used to work for one. Had a client who was ready to close on a house, then backed out at the last minute because the neighborhood DID NOT have an HOA. I was stunned. My family was driven from the first house I grew up in by a psychotic HOA president who happened to be our next door neighbor. Harpies from hell, all of them, except maintenance-only ones, but pretty much all of those exist because someone got out of control.
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98points
#9
I had one experience while we were looking for a house where we were the ones that came across as weird for our reasoning to not buy it.
We had found a really nice house and everything about it seemed great. I had one concern about a tree that was planted extremely close to the house and I wanted to look into it because you don't want foundation problems. Not all trees have roots that will damage a foundation if they're planted close though, so I found out what kind of tree it was to see if it would be a problem. In the process of learning about the tree, I found out that it was a Yew tree, and that the pollen of male Yew trees are chemotoxic. Meaning it is toxic to cancer cells. However, it has this effect by functioning in your body as if you were taking low levels of chemo basically. So people end up with low grade symptoms of chemotherapy from exposure to the pollen of this tree, and most of the time have no idea why they feel sick. So we told the real estate agent that we were interested in the house, but needed to know one thing: is the tree in front of the house (right up against the large window) male for female? She asked the owners, and they said they didn't know, but I imagine they thought that was a weird question, lol. Since they couldn't tell us, we decided not to buy the house.
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97points
On the other hand, buying a house is, in any case, a situation that causes stress, because you are making a purchase for a long time, if not forever. And it’s not surprising that a person wants to avoid possible negative factors such as poor infrastructure or entitled neighbors. After all, they have to live there. So, when a choice of this degree of importance is made, hesitation and vagaries are almost inevitable. Well, or the new residents become entitled neighbors themselves... This option also cannot be discarded.
#10
Not a Realtor but potential buyer, our realtor brought us to a house listed as a 3BR, 2-1/2 Bath.
After going through the house, we liked it a lot, until something clicked for us - there were no bathrooms to be found. We went through the house again, and upon opening a closet door in a Bedroom, we found inside the tiny closet a single Toilet. No lights, sink, tub, nothing. The house wasn't even a 1 Bath, it was like 1/4 bath.
The realtor, very seriously, told us if we knocked down the wall, ran some pipes, we could convert one of the bedrooms into the bathroom. We laughed thinking he was joking. He wasn't.
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93points
#11
Found a dead body in the bathroom.
Apparently a contractor working in the house decided to shoot up before he left on Friday and OD'd. Nobody was in the house all weekend and he was found by Monday afternoon during a showing.
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92points
#12
Not a realtor, but I worked in finance at an RV dealership a few years back. I had a couple fly in from out of state to look at a brand new $400,000 unit that had specific features they were after and they put a deposit on it.
I got them approved and scheduled a time for them to sign, but they backed out at the last minute because they weren’t sure their cat would like it. They flew back home.
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92points
Either way, even if you've never bought a home, we highly recommend reading all the stories on this list. At least for two main reasons. First, the vast majority of these tales are really amusing. Second is that perhaps when (or if) you buy a house yourself, you will probably remember one of the stories you read today and in time refuse the dubious purchase. And then the alarming music behind the scenes will end in confusion - who actually knows?
#13
The reason I didn't buy one house was my realtor was running late, so I was parked in my car near the house I was going to look at on the side of the road fir about half an hour. About 2, maybe 3 blocks away in a rural area of Washougal, Washington. About that time this a*****e pulls out of the driveway of the house I'm scheduled to see, pulls up along side my car, rolls down the window, takes a picture of me with their phone, then flips me off before they peel out the tires and drive off at high speed. Turns out it was the homeowner that was trying to sell. So yeah, I didn't even bother with seeing the inside of what was an otherwise good prospect because I was so irritated at the owner. My realtor later gave their listing agent a call about it because they were annoyed about missing out on a potentially large commission, and I later found out the owner thought I was "[an addict] trying to steal wifi from him" . Not sure why, as I was in a pretty nice car wearing a suit that day... but yeah, I did not buy that house.
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85points
#14
Not me but my dad did some residential and commercial back in the 70. Lady came in and loved the house until they got to a guest bedroom that was painted yellow. She instantly switched and said " I can't buy this house because this is yellow."
My dad says "We'll paint it. Any color you want." Her response drove him to do strictly commercial after that. "But I'll know it was yellow once."
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84points
#15
I’m not a realtor but one of my childhood friend’s mothers was and she told me this story when I was in 4th grade and I still think about it nearly 20 years later.
She came home upset one day after school and we asked her what’s wrong. She said she just lost a sale because of a toilet seat. During the initial walk through her client pointed out an epoxy toilet seat that was filled with sea shells and how much she loved it. She made an offer on the house. Later they do the final walk through right before going to go sign the closing documents and that toilet seat is gone and replaced with a normal white one. The woman is pissed and refuses to close without the toilet seat. The sellers refuse to give her the toilet seat. The sale falls through.
Can you imagine buying a whole a*s house because you want an epoxy toilet seat?
This was the 90s so there wasn’t the whole internet of things at our finger tips to just up and get a replacement. But still.
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84points
#16
There was a house we looked at that met most of our criteria, but when we went back outside, we noticed that the next-door neighbor has all these signs on this porch posts: KEEP OUT; NOT TRESPASSING; BEWARE OF DOG, etc., and piles of junk furniture and machinery on the porch.
Not who ***I*** want to live next door to.
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78points
#17
not a realtor, but when I was trying to sell my condo, someone found out I had cats and didn’t want to buy for that reason alone. There was no carpet. They had no allergies. They just didn’t like cats. The cats were coming with me when I moved and they didn’t open up a portal to hell in the living room floor or anything.
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75points
#18
My family home was bought by a young man in the military and his very quirky wife. They had already ruled out dozens of houses and settled on ours because it had adequate chi flow from the front door.
When they saw that the bed was directly under a window in the bedroom, the wife freaked out and said that it was sucking out our brains.
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74points
#19
Literally happened to me last week. Showed my home off market to a couple from Minnesota. They flew into my area for a weekend specifically to see my house because they liked the photos I sent them of the place.
They wanted a home with five bedrooms all on the second floor, and at least 4k sqft. My house is the only one within 130 miles for sale fitting that description and we put a lot of work in to unf**k what the prior owners did to the place. The prior owner thought he knew how to do his own work. He did not. We spent tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours fixing stuff he DIYed poorly (and sometimes dangerously).
They come and spend two hours meticulously going through everything. They loved the house and their realtor said on the side they’d put in an offer within the next day.
Then they drove off.
The next day my realtor calls me damn near in tears laughing saying that he just got off the phone with their realtor.
The couple decided not to put in an offer because a full street over and down a hill there are above ground power lines. They thought those power lines were 5G cell towers in a cluster and they were terrified that it was going to beam COVID into their kids’ heads if they played outside.
They said it with a straight face to their realtor, apparently.
The kicker is that there’s actually a 5G tower two doors down from my house that they didn’t even notice. They ultimately bought a very small house two towns over with no above ground power lines but *with* 5G towers in the vicinity.
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72points
#20
Some old friends of mine were buying their first house and was sitting at the bank together with the seller when he told them that with a minor raise he would leave the wiring in the house. Then they understood it was time to leave.
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72points