Dad made his living with apartments. As a result, I grew up in a house with a lot of real-estate stuff flying in the air. That does not make me an expert by any means, but it does give me at least an emotional cue. After growing up with it, you learn when dinner's going to be peaceful or a $hitstorm. You learn to guess whether the deal is going down or not.
My gut reaction to this is much like the others. The seller's wife is the unseen force driving this thing to go sideways.
Given that the purchase of their new property is contingent on the sale of this, the seller has his balls in a vice. He's going to have to sign or else his house of cards is going to fall. I saw this happen once with a neighbor that was over-extended on his real-estate deals. He damn-near lost the whole kaboodle and this would have undoubtedly triggered a divorce as well. $325K in hand is a powerful incentive.
BTW: before I go further in this, let me just say that when Dad would get a situation like this, his normal instinct would be to walk away from the deal. I'm not saying this is the best way to go; I'm just saying Dad's way of looking at it was that once you see a fin in the water, you get out. You don't wait to see if it is a shark. Mom was, even more, this way, but her reactions were always based on honesty/dishonesty. She would not deal with deceit.
Let me just throw a possible motive into this. This is one I've seen happen. I was involved in a version of this scenario with my ex, Satan, but the motivations were reversed. Seller's wife (we'll call her Jane) has property that has been in the family since 1920. That's easily a pre-marital asset. Seller (Bob) wants to sell it off and move to the big new place nearby. In the midst of all this, somebody whispers to Jane that if she allows the sale of the property, then she loses her pre-marital asset designation on the funds and the whole thing goes into the communal property bucket. Things may or may not be completely kosher in their marriage. Bob may or may not be motivated by this. However, Jane may begin to think Bob is making a play to get half the value of the family farm.
Me? I found myself about 2 years before my separation from Satan going to house showings for no good reason. Satan kept pushing to move even when the house was not as good as the current one. The reason became clear when we separated. I bought the house with assets I'd brought into the marriage. She had not put in a dime. She'd been gunning for the pre-marital assets I'd thrown into the current house. If we bought a new house, she'd now have claim to half. It all came out in our divorce. She kept trying to get what was obviously pre-marital assets assigned to her. Since then, I've seen versions of this show up in other divorce fights. Somebody must have written a book on it. This may be Bob's gambit. Jane may have figured it out.
