On the internet we found a DR Horton development we liked, called Town Centre resort, close to Disney. There were only three homes left on the site, so we immediately wired $2,000 on 3rd September as a deposit on the home of our choice, lot #641. A few days later, DR Horton sent us a purchase contract to sign.
We explained that, although we really liked the pictures we'd seen, we really couldn't buy a home costing over $200,000 until we'd seen it! We live in Denmark and the earliest we could get to Florida was 24th September. One of DR Horton's sales team for the Town Centre development was Mike Andrews and he really put the pressure on us to sign the contract, some of his phone calls and e-mails were less than pleasant.
Anyway, we bought airline tickets for our parents to travel from England to Denmark to look after our two young children whilst we came to Florida, purchased our own airline tickets to the USA and booked a hire care, hotel, etc. All the time we assured DR Horton that we were excited about seeing the house and signing the sales contract.
We duly arrived at the site on 24th September, and met with our broker, James Aquilar and a different DR Horton sales person, Lauren LePage.
We were actually shown inside the home, before Lauren dropped the bomshell that another contract had been issued on the property for some time to a cash buyer, who was signing that very same day, and the home was effectively already sold!
We were upset and shocked - DR Horton had allowed us to travel all the way from Denmark, all the while knowing that they had another buyer. They just strung us along in case the cash purchase fell through. When I said as much to Lauren lePage she just shrugged and said "that's business".
She went on to helpfully explain that it was their financial year-end and they had to get the entire development sold before the end of September - she added that she had already pulled contracts on two other potential buyers; let's hope they didn't lose as much as us.
By the way, it took us just four hours to wire our $2,000 deposit to DR Horton. It took them exactly a month to return it.
Alison
2840
Denmark
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