I believe it was Confucius who said that he who hesitates gets flattened by an 18 wheeler laden with 10 tons of abject irony along life’s crooked highway.  Or was it something about those who dally within the confines of a centrifuge being at great peril of becoming centrifugal?  Regardless of the exact phrasing, the veracity of the axiom is never more resplendent in self evidence than in its pertinence to a Real Estate transaction.  Get in, get out, and for God’s sakes man, do it on the quick step.

Case in point: 

August 8^th, 2009.  The night was warm and dry.  Once again defying all logic, Phoenix did not burn up upon reentry into this late summer evening, and its denizens scurried out of air conditioned alcoves to forage for supplies as the sun dipped below the White Tank Mountains in the far Western sky.  Taking full advantage of the reprieve, I was amongst the throng vying to get sixty eight errands done in a three hour span.  That’s when the call came.

A little background.  A client of mine purchased a beautiful home in Queen Creek two years ago.  One job transfer and complete meltdown of Western civilization later, the home is unfortunately worth about 50% of its prior value.  So we attempted to hammer out a short sale.  Rife with frustration, incompetence, duplication and other multi-syllabic words, short sales are the very antithesis of expediency.  It takes forever and a day just to get a negotiator from the bank assigned to the transaction.  Once the negotiator is assigned, it can literally take weeks just to choke the direct phone number to the cave where they hide him out of a disinterested call center employee. 

It’s crazy.  It’s maddening.  It’s 2009.

The upshot is that 6 months and many stops and starts later, the deal we secured was approved by the bank and headed for closing.  Loan docs were in and we were set to put a ribbon on the whole shebang in two days.  It didn’t matter that the bank had screwed up the first approval by providing an unrealistic closing window.  It didn’t matter that it took an additional three weeks and a new set of BPOs (broker price opinions) to get the closing timeframe extended to a reasonable period of time to line up the buyer’s financing.  It didn’t matter that the buyer had nearly backed out several times during the interminable wait as concern mounted about the continued erosion in values.  Or that we had to sweat through an appraisal in August for a sale that was negotiated in February.  We were finally at the finish line.

And then the fateful call came.  Had the pool service not been performed?  Was there new damage to the property?  No, we had somehow managed to ride out the entire escrow without incurring any additional issues with the home itself. 

The buyer lost his job.

Called in over the weekend and informed that his services were no longer wanted, months of work went straight down the portal to Real Estate hell that opened up under our feet.  More pointedly, months of waiting went down said portal.  Had the lienholder acted with the expediency and urgency that actual Real Estate professionals understand is vital to the successful culmination of a transaction, the unfortunate eventuality would be somebody else’s problem.  Instead, the hot potato remains firmly in the bank’s seared hands.

Time kills deals. 

The glacial pace that most institutions operate with only serves to demonstrate why bankers should stick to banking.  The moral that the average consumer can take from this tale of woe is that you never take a Real Estate sale for granted.  Things can and will happen between contract acceptance and closing.  To limit those things that can sink your battleship, you want to get to the closing table as soon as humanly possible.  Death, job loss, a bad night in Vegas … any manner of variable can rear its red inked head to sabotage your sale. 

When you have the opportunity to close, close.  If that means you have to reschedule the movers and change the turn-off date on your utilities, so be it.  A little inconvenience is cheap insurance against catastrophe.

Flattened by the big rig and dizzy from centrifugal force, we limp back onto the market.  Nimble as we can be with a 500 pound gorilla in tow.