The Buyers I Knew Wouldn't Make It, and Sold To Anyway

A few years ago, on a project I was leading in Romania, we were very close to the quarterly sales target. Very, very close. The sales team had worked hard, marketing had produced quality leads, and almost all the units in the first phase were already closed. A few units were left, and a few potential buyers who were at advanced stages of negotiation.

Some of those buyers were excellent. Some, and I remember this because I felt it even then, were under strain. The remaining units were the relatively expensive ones in the project, and in the preliminary conversations with a few of them you could hear hints. Questions about flexibility in payments. Hesitation when we talked about the financing structure. A request to "check a little more" before signing the preliminary agreement.

I knew how to read those signs. I had done it hundreds of times in my role as a lawyer, from the other side of the table, for clients. This time I was on the developer's side, facing the quarterly target, and facing his team, who were waiting to see whether we'd close the phase.

I didn't stop.

Not because I didn't understand the risk. Because I wanted to help the developer and his team make the numbers work. I wanted to help them close the target. And at that moment, the explanation I gave myself was perfectly reasonable: "There's a preliminary agreement, there's a first payment, and if something goes wrong, we have legal tools." And that's true. There are legal tools. But legal tools don't prevent a delay in the project. They only deal with it after it has already happened.

Within a few months it happened exactly as I had feared: two of the buyers couldn't complete the bank financing they had planned. One of them tried, on and off, for a long time, until the developer realized we were only postponing the inevitable. The other side of it was exactly as hard as you'd imagine: a process to cancel a preliminary agreement, a partial refund according to the mechanism set out in the contract, and re-marketing those same units, this time with less time left before the final handover date for the whole project.

In the end, the units were resold. The developer didn't lose money on paper. But he lost time, the team lost its peace of mind during those months, and I personally lost something else: the confidence that I always stop in time.

I think about this every time a developer sits across from me close to a sales target and shows me an "almost closed" buyer. The temptation to push a little more, to ignore the small hint, to give the buyer another round of clarifications instead of asking the direct question, isn't a temptation of unprofessional people. It's a temptation that comes exactly when you're closest to success, and that's why it's the hardest to spot.

Today, on the projects I support, as a developer or as a lawyer, I have a rule I haven't broken since: if there's a clear sign of uncertainty about financing, I stop and ask the direct question before going further in the process. Even if it means giving up a buyer who's close to signing. Better to give him up now than to find out after the unit has already been taken off the market for other buyers.