Playing Hardball with a Potential Buyer

Bird Dogs, Wholesaling
1

I’ve got a property under an Option Agreement with a seller.
I’ve got a buyer in hand and ready to move forward… until there is a little pebble that’s become a boulder in his eye.

I told him he had to pay me the Good Faith Deposit so I could start Escrow and he’d take my place as the buyer.

He seems to think the only way to go about it is to start Earnest Money thru Escrow, not with me.
He’s confused on why he has to pay me.
I’ve (naively) held the property for him (actually I don’t have another buyer lined up) for a week
because he said he is ready to buy.
He was suppose to pay the deposit on Thursday and ended up going to the hospital… all that aside.

Should I tell him I’ll have to turn the property over to another buyer - so he’ll make a move and get past
this boulder sized pebble?

What would you do to get him to get moving on it?
He has cash to buy and could have got it rolling today.
I need to get paperwork turned in ASAP to get the title cleared for closing date June 27.

I’ve even explained to him that I’m doing the same EXACT type of deal at the Escrow company with
another agent on a different property.

2

Is the buyer attempting to bypass you?

If not, then perhaps you’re coming across like a newbie and making the buyer nervous about giving you money, instead of giving it to the title/escrow office.

This is still a trust-related business we’re in regardless. Act confident, and have a good/bad/indifferent “reason” for everything you ask for. Did I mention the part about ‘acting confident?’

If this were me, I would simply have told the buyer that “My policy is to assign my option contracts upon receipt of my ‘standard, non-refundable, option assignment fee of “x” dollars,’ so that [here comes the reason] the assignee is given total control of the transaction.”

Of course, the burden then is put on the optionee/assignee to open escrow and exercise his option to buy, or not. Meantime, I get my fee, whether he exercises his option, or not.

This is a standard wholesaling fee model.

As an aside, why not make sure your option period is longer than your assignee’s option period, and that it survives his failure to close on time? This gives you time to resell the option …for a fee.

In your case, I would continue shopping for assignees, and call it a day.

If the current optionee performs, great. If not, you’ll have another buyer in the line up.

Maybe your buyer is shopping your offer to a down-line assignee, and the “hospital” thing is just a stalling tactic to keep himself from having to go hard on your deal?

This is the same stalling tactic that dishonest operators pull when they ‘suddenly go on vacation, out of the country, for a week’ while you’re waiting for an answer to your offer. The seller is actually bizzy-bizzy shopping your offer.

Stalling reasons include vacations, surgeries, deaths in the family, dying grandmothers, and any number of excuses not to respond. It’s amazing how many traumas happen right during a negotiation.

At this point, when/if I hear that the ‘other’ party is going on, is on, or won’t be back from …vacation for ‘x’ days/weeks …we can guess who’s the sucker.

I hate that.