Legal Question in Real Estate Law in Massachusetts

Re: Buyer is past the P&S close date

I assume my answer comes too late to be of any use to you. You obviously need an attorney of your own to thoroughly examine the relevant facts, but I'll give you some off-hand knee-jerk reactions based on general knowledge, not specific to your situation.

Without my seeing your P & S and having all the facts at hand, I'll guess that the escrow agent (broker) who has the downpayment on your condo will be required to hold it awhile longer instead of giving it back to the buyer. While she holds it, you could try to sell your condo to someone else and if the price is lower (interest excluded, usually, but arguably includible), you could make up the difference from that deposit, but you'll have a little legal battle. That's the normal route. You have a better route to keeping the condo downpayment: the measure of your damages is your $1,000 plus whatever amount of the downpayment you forfeited.

Frankly, I think you made a lousy deal when you agreed to give another $1,000 AND to lose the downpayment after another week. How did you know your asthmatic would wake up and sign the document within another week? More importantly, you should not have agreed to forfeit your downpayment anyway -- let them prove that they really lost some money (suffered damages we say) by doing that. Were you represented by a lawyer? You ought to have been. I could see giving them the $1,000 outright, although even that I think you could have argued for.

For keeping the condo downpayment, you would use the fact that you lost the house purchase, your $1,000 and whatever downpayment you made on that as the best measure of damages suffered. It might be hard to argue that you lost the benefit of a good sale price, too, but throw it in if it's true.

On another hand, an asthmatic who goes into a coma and probably is in the hospital certainly deserves sympathy, if it's true. Ask for the "medicals" to be certain or for permission to obtain them to be SURE. I've heard a lot of "I was sick and I went to the hospital" stories used as excused to get out of contracts and court dates.

And if the attacks are regular and were thus predictable, the condo buyer could have signed the deed weeks in advance and had a lawyer or friend/relative (under power of attorney) handle the closing for her. Would she still like to buy the place if you had somewhere to go?