Phoney Buyers Beware!

Tracie has been in the house market for the last few weeks. We found a house that we wanted to put in an offer on, and just as we were sitting down to do the paper work for the offer, our realtor got a call from the listing agent that notified him to the presence of competing buyers. Apparently they had been thinking of buying and wanted to be notified if anyone else wanted to put in an offer. This seemed pretty stupid to me, because now not only would they have to pay closer to the asking price, so would we, which could mean shelling out an extra $3000-$4000.

We wrote up our offer and it was actually about $5500 more than I wanted to offer, and the maximum that we could possibly afford, but we wanted the house. We took the offer to the house to present it to the owners and their realtors, but the other prospective buyers weren't there, so we waited a while. The listing agent wanted to see our offer right away, but luckily our realtor wouldn't show it until the other offer was also there.

It turned out to be a stroke of luck because the other guys didn't want to compete on it either. Apparently "they" changed their minds and by "changed their minds", I mean "they" didn't actually exist. The phoney buyer trick is quite possibly the oldest trick in the book. I wasn't really fooled by it, I mean, there was something really fishy about the whole deal.

Besides I remember the time Dad was a phoney buyer one time to convince some owners to pay money they owed to get the lien taken off their house.

We quickly dropped our offer by $5500 and presented it. We brought the original price down by $5500, and actually saved $1000 off of what would have been our initial offering price had we been competing with the other "buyers"

Here is a small picture of the house that we got.