The Piano Heist

Contingent sales* can be tough. There are constant questions up in the air and life is in limbo for everyone involved right up until all the sales are closed. Most of the time there are just two dominos**; other times there can be 3 or 4 spread out over multiple states. Every time I enter into one of these projects, I am usually a listing agent AND buyer’s agent; the level of planning, forethought and execution is substantially more as compared to a conventional sale. On the front end I always feel like I’m planning a robbery and, when it is done, I get bank-heist-vibes.

I was recently involved in one that felt like an Oceans 11 caper!! We had to thread the needle at every step and it turned into a six-week odyssey that my client and I would rather forget. It all started this summer at a Grateful Dead cover band show in Hood River. My future client (we’ll call her Donna Jean or DJ for short) said to me “I want to move, and I’d like you to help me”. Sure! I said.

With any sell/buy scenario, the first thing I’ll do with a client is put together a prep list and rough pricing for their current house; we’ll call this the “sale”. Step two is to go tour some listings in their price range to ensure that the budget matches the expectation of what they want in a new home; this is the “purchase”.

In a perfect world, we can get the sale under contract in short order, identify the new home + get a contingent offer accepted on it and then get both sales closed within a few days of each other. This way there is just one move and the proceeds from the sale go seamlessly to the purchase.

In markets past, pulling off the contingent sale has been out of the question because of the high level of competition. “Why would I accept this offer, contingent on the sale of their house, when I have 3 other non-contingent offers to pick from?”. In the market of 2025, sellers who have been languishing on the market for months are more than happy to take a little risk.

DJ’s sale started off great. She did a thorough prep job taking my advice on just about everything. The house photographed phenomenology, and we got 3 offers after the first weekend on the market. In the meantime, there was a house that fit the bill for the purchase and we wrote an offer on it at about the same time that the sale went pending. Threading the needle here…both houses where in the inspection period at the same time and were set to close within the same week. Perfect, right?

In the midst of this mele, I had an unrelated sale that closed just around the corner in Hillsdale (SW Portland). I was representing the buyer; the seller was moving out of his boyhood home with a lot of emotions and stuff as you might imagine. One item that the new owners did not want was a baby grand piano. What to do with it? My client didn’t care EXCEPT they wanted it out of the house before moving in. Believe it or not, two days later, while standing the grand living room of her purchase, DJ said “This would be a great spot for a piano. If we had one”. Do you want one? I said. I made the arrangements with the parties in the other transaction, and we had a plan to move it into storage until DJ’s sales were closed. Simple, right?

Both of the inspection periods turned out to be pretty gnarly. Without getting too deep into the details, there were elements of willful ignorance, negligence and high emotions. We squarely lost both of those negotiations, but were still way ahead of the game with the gains that were made in the sale (offer way above asking price) and purchase (acceptance significantly under asking). More importantly, from the 30,000 foot vantage point, both sales were on track to close on time and everyone feeling the win-win after the dust had settled a little. Simple, right?

The day before closing I get the call from the buyer’s agent on the sale: there is a problem with the loan. I could write a boring, single spaced pamphlet on the details of this, but we’ll save that for another day. Just trust me that it was an issue large enough to hold up closing for several weeks. Most of that time was spent in limbo not knowing if either sale was going to happen. If the sale dies, so does the purchase.

I spent the first week on the apology tour much like a cancelled celebrity doing struggle sessions on various media outlets. Of course, none of this was my doing, but I am untimely responsible for the management of both sales and it is my job to keep it all together (much like the Wolf, played by Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction). The main customer of my genuflection was the listing agent and seller for the purchase. They are a few layers removed from the details of the loan drama, but it directly affects their situation. Fortunately, they were patient, understanding AND did not make a go at DJ’s earnest money***.

In short, the buyer for the sale had to start from scratch with a COMPLETELY NEW loan with all the included joys: appraisals, underwriting, etc. There was a lot of urgency and cashed-in-favors from the lender, but the wheels of the back office turn slowly, and when they say “it will be 3 business days until we hear back about this detail or that”…they actually mean it.

It all comes down to this. If the underwriter signs off on the “exception”, I’ll meet you there on Friday to hand off the keys. If they don’t, then both deals go down in flames and we are back to where we started: grooving to Jack Straw on that July night in Hood River.

I was in the other room when the phone rang. Shit, if it was good news I would have just gotten an exuberant text. Then I heard the text ding. Maybe it was just my wife? “Clear to close!!!!” it said. I didn’t realize how much weight was on my shoulders until it was taken off. Then I got to make the best phone call ever…see you there on Friday to hand off the keys…and I can’t wait to see how that piano looks in the great room!

*A “contingent sale” is when the offer is dependent upon the sale (accept offer) and closing (of said offer) of the property that the buyer currently owns. In some cases, the house isn’t even on the market yet. In this case it was only contingent on the closing because we got an offer accepted on the sale at about the same time as the purchase.

**In this example there were just two “dominos”: DJ’s sale and purchase. If our buyers had a house in Aspen that there were selling and the seller (of the purchase) was buying a house in Palm Springs, then we would have had a four-domino-situation. If one falls…everything that is downhill from it goes into limbo.

***The “earnest money” is typically 1%-ish of the purchase price and is deposited into escrow at the beginning of any transaction. It is refundable to the buyer under most circumstances, but when the above situation arises, there is a scenario where it has to be released to the seller for them to stay on board. “Sure, we’ll give you an extra 3 weeks to close, but we want you to release the EM to the sellers and make it non-refundable”. Literally putting your money where your mouth is. The idea was floated by the listing agent on the purchase, but I advised strongly against making that a part of the extension. If they do it to us, then we have to do it to our buyers, and the tension is ratcheted up several notches. Nobody needs that and we agree to keep things at a simmer as opposed to a boil.