It was 11pm when the call came, a time when any phone call is bound to be bad news. "Deb? It's Betsy. Oh God. I'm so sorry."
The voice on the other end of the line was trembling and clotted with tears. Betsy and her husband had agreed to buy my house --my personal home, a McMansion in the suburbs of Indianapolis. We were under contract. Closing was two weeks away. After staging it to perfection, I'd received her offer in only nine days, even in the midst of a tanking market.
I knew it had to be too good to be true.
"Sorry about what?" I asked, my heart already sinking.
"It's my husband," she said, pausing to blow her nose. "He...he wants a divorce! We're not going to be able to buy your house after all." She was bawling now.
I empathized with her, talked to her as a friend, told her everything would be okay, one way or the other. But I also told her, calmly, that she was under contract and I had every confidence that we'd proceed to closing. I recommended a good marriage counselor. Then I called my attorney.
I couldn't possibly put the house back on the market. It was no longer staged to sparkle, it was poised to move. Boxes were everywhere. The vignettes I'd carefully crafted around the house and out in the yard were dismantled in favor of real life concerns. Above all, I had a contract and, even under these apparently untenable circumstances, I had every intention of moving forward. With the sale. With my life.
My attorney sent a letter reminding the buyers that they had signed an agreement and were indeed under every obligation to fulfill it, divorce or not. The next few weeks were nail-biters as I waited to see whether they'd push back and pull out of the deal. Nervewracking. I know that some couples will buy a house when the relationship is struggling, in the same way others will have a child, or adopt a new pet. Maybe that was the case for Betsy.
If nothing else, the experience put me in a good position to help others interested in Indianapolis real estate. I learned that a crisis doesn't mean the end of a deal. I learned that you can be empathic without shifting course.
Bottom line, I sold my house. Betsy called a few weeks later to say that her husband had moved to the basement while they "worked it out." And they did work it out. Two years later they're still together and my guess is that their relationship is no better or worse than most these days.
Who knows, maybe by holding them to the contract I saved their marriage.
Do you have an 11th hour crisis to share? How did you handle it? What did you learn from it?
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