The date calendar started from the wrong document. $2,000 of earnest money gone.

Before I even get to the fault question. Did she send you a written date calendar at all, or did she keep the dates on her side and just email reminders? Because those are two completely different services and I've been trying to work out which one I'd actually be buying.

@anchor that's the question I'd want answered too.

@rigging, the eight day appraisal slip is what I'd look at. If the reinspection had come back on time, does your financing still fall apart on the DSCR number, or does it close? Because if it closes, the coordination broke the deal. If the sizing was always going to be short, the coordination just changed how expensive the exit was.

$2,850 to learn that verbal loan quotes aren't loan quotes is not the worst tuition I've read on here.

I do land and my timelines are usually longer and emptier, so I notice this differently. On a 30 day financing window there's basically no slack anywhere. One third party doing one extra site visit ends it. Was 30 days your number or the seller's?

The part that would have gotten me is the addendum. I would absolutely have uploaded one document and thought I was done. Did the wrong start date actually shift any deadline, or did the addendum only change the price?

Near miss on my side, same shape. Coordinator had the lender in her contacts but the loan officer had left the company mid-file and the emails were going into a dead inbox for eleven days. Nobody noticed because she was getting no bounce and no reply and treated silence as "working on it."

Silence from a third party isn't a status. Somebody has to convert it to a yes or no every few days.

Small multifamily here and I see the cause differently from @cobalt. The form field is real, but you had an agent. On a two unit purchase with a financing contingency, the buyer's agent watching the loan contingency date is ordinary work, coordinator or no coordinator. Adding a third party without saying who owns what turned two people watching into zero.

@rigging, what did your agent say when the date passed?

The number I'd keep in front of me is that the total loss was 57 percent of your earnest money plus costs. On a bigger deposit that's a much scarier ratio, and the mistake scales exactly the same way.

I close fast and thin so I'll be blun. The default was your broker. "Quoted verbally" and "DSCR sizing" in the same sentence means you had no term sheet, and no coordinator on earth fixes that.

A coordinator keeps a good file moving. She isn't underwriting your loan.

Construction side of this. Appraisal reinspection on a garage roof, with a credit addendum on the same garage, is a pretty predictable eight days. The appraiser wants to see the work or see it priced, and if there's a lender required repair the reinspection gets scheduled around one guy's route.

If you'd flagged the garage as an appraisal risk at contract signing, you'd have asked for 45 days instead of 30. That's the cheap version of this lesson.

I'd want to read the contract language before assigning any blame. Whether a financing contingency is waived by lapse, or whether written notice is required to waive it, comes down to the specific form and the state, and some forms treat those very differently. You said you settled, which suggests both sides thought they had some risk.

That's a question for a real estate attorney in your state, and it's worth asking now so you know what your standard form actually does before your next contract.

I've got two files open right now and the thing I changed after a mess like yours is dumb and it works. Every Monday I send one email to every party on the file, agents, lender, title, coordinator, with the next three dates and who is responsible for each. Takes six minutes.

Twice someone has replied "wait, I thought you were handling that." That reply is the whole point of the email.

I'd been reading for months and still never asked who owns the deadline when you hire someone to track the deadlines. That's genuinely the useful part of this post for me.

@rigging did her agreement say anything about scope at all, or was it a handshake and an invoice?

I'd bet the agreement said something like "coordinator provides administrative support and deadline tracking" with no definition of tracking, and a clause somewhere putting all decisions and all responsibility for compliance on the client. That's the standard construction, and it means the coordinator is not the backstop even when she's the one with the calendar.

@rigging, pull the agreement out and read the limitation of liability paragraph. It'll tell you exactly what you bought, which is probably less than you thought at $300.

Underwriting is my whole job so I'll say the unpopular version. The deal died at the sizing, not at the calendar.

Your broker quoted something verbally, the appraisal came in and the debt service coverage didn't support the loan amount you'd underwritten to. That happens on day 22 or day 38, and either way you're short. What the missed deadline cost you was the right to walk cleanly. Call the coordination failure a $2,000 exit fee on a deal that was already broken.

Also, an appraisal that supports a lower value on a two unit is common enough that I run my numbers at a haircut to the contract price now.

Sorry for the basic question, I'm reading everything twice at this stage. What is an extension addendum actually, and who normally writes it? @rigging said signing it after the date isn't an extension, and I want to understand why that's true.

@juniper it's a short signed document that both sides agree to that moves a date in the contract to a later date. Usually the agent for whoever needs the extra time drafts it on a standard form, and the other side signs or doesn't.

The reason timing matters is that before the date, you still have your rights under the contract and you're asking to extend them. After the date, those rights are gone and you're asking the seller to give you something back. The seller can just say no, or say yes for a price. That's the situation @rigging landed in.

Adding this to my first deal cost sheet. $550 inspections, $300 coordinator, and a line I hadn't had at all called "earnest money at risk if the financing date slips." I'd been treating the deposit as fully refundable in my head.

On the lending side of the timeline, the thing that kills these is that the appraisal order date is not the appraisal delivery date, and nobody tells the borrower which one their contingency was built around. A reinspection adds a second scheduling queue on top.

Ask your lender, in writing, for their current expected turn times on appraisal and on final loan approval before you agree to a contingency period. Terms and timelines vary by lender and change, so get the number from them rather than from a general rule.

Rural markets make @tender's point worse. Two appraisers cover my whole county and a reinspection can mean eleven days because the man is a hundred miles away on Tuesdays. I don't sign anything under 45 days anymore and I say why in the offer. Sellers here have mostly stopped arguing about it.