Well, it seems like we've given up hope for buying a condo for now. We're anxious to move out of our current dwelling into something cheaper, so we started looking for 2 bedroom apartments around town. We've got an appointment to see one tonight. Its in Arlington, near Russ and Jeff. Looking at apartments is so much less stressful; yet the pace of the search makes things stressful all over again. Hopefully things will work out a little better this time.

Well, it all fell apart once again. This time, there wasn't anything really wrong with the condo. In fact, I really liked the place and was pretty excited over the prospect of living there. However, problems started cropping up in our relationship with the seller's agent and we started feeling as though something wasn't completely right.

In fact, things started off on the wrong foot. When we first met the Realtor, he didn't mention who he worked for. Naively, I assumed that he was working for us, and had to ask him directly before he admitted that he was not. After Laura and I decided to put an offer on the unit, the forms and documents he gave us were woefully incomplete, and sloppily prepared. For example, a lead paint disclosure document was never filled out by the seller, the offer form he provided was missing vital information like the appliances included.

In the end, it was a dispute over a referral fee that sunk the deal. When we first met with the Realtor we mentioned that we had a referral from another Realtor. He said that was fine and asked the other agent to fax his office. However, citing dubious reasons, he refused to honor the referral. It got to the point where the selling agents were demanding that we indemnify them in the purchase and sale against any claims from other Realtors!

This combined with all the previous shady behavior made us realize that no matter how much we liked the condo, these were not people we wanted to do business with.Virtually everything that came out of his mouth turned out to be misleading our outright false. At this point I'm just glad I don't have to deal with the whole issue anymore. Next time we're making sure we have our own representation, and hopefully we can deal with people who are more knowledgable and a lot less slimey.

We had the first round of the home inspection on Monday. We used the same inspectors that found the Mold of Doom, Jackson Home Inspection. The inspector found a few problems in the basement, and raised a bunch of questions that I forwarded to our lawyer. Hopefully those can get taken care of so we can sign off on the purchase and sale this week!