Somebody offered us a house. An inheritance, according to the seller. Everything fine, until we got close to the closing.
That’s when the red flags started. Things that didn’t add up. Documents that didn’t fit together. The more we dug, the less sense any of it made.
So I asked her straight: "Tell me what’s going on. There are things here that don’t make sense, and you know that when the lawyer starts digging for the closing, all of it is going to come out. Better you talk to me clear."
And it came out. The "dead man" wasn’t dead. He was alive. Older, in a nursing home.
Why lie? Because a lot of people, when they hear the owner is still alive, assume the closing is going to take forever and they back out. So she decided to say the person had passed, to see if it would move quick.
When I asked her directly, she came clean. She understood herself that sooner or later it was going to surface.
The lesson: in this business the red flags never stay quiet. Either you talk about them head on, or the closing drags them out for you. We’d rather have the truth from day one.