An end buyer walked the night before closing over a roof he had already inspected
A cautionary pattern worth knowing in wholesaling: a small three bedroom house, tired but nothing dramatic, gets locked up under contract with an assignment fee around 9,000, reasonable for that market. The end buyer, an investor who has closed on assignments before, walks the property in person, spends time on the roof, and photographs it. Eleven days later, at 6pm the evening before closing, he texts that the roof is worse than he thought and he is backing out. What often turns out to be true in cases like this, sometimes learned only after the fact, is that the buyer had gotten into other deals that same week and run out of cash, and the roof was simply the reason he could point to rather than the actual cause. The recovery in a case like this comes down to working the phone that same night. Landing a replacement buyer, even one with a thinner relationship, at a lower price, say 6,000 instead of 9,000, and absorbing a week's extension with the seller, is often the realistic outcome rather than losing the deal entirely. When the seller is someone selling a late parent's house and stays gracious through the delay, that grace tends to sit heavier than if she had been upset. The lesson is not simply to have more buyers lined up. It is that a buyer who sounds excited on the phone and a buyer with money actually sitting in an account are two different people, and there is often no reliable way to tell which one is on the other end of that phone call until the moment closing is supposed to happen.
