I need to vent a little

[carolina-rig-01]

Guys I honestly can't remember the last time I have been this mad. Britney and I have been house shopping for around 6 months now and were having a tough time finding what we want. Before this goes any further I should say that building is not something that we want to deal with right now but what we are looking for honestly shouldn't be this hard to find. We have looked at several houses that we love but the big problem is that I will be building a shop for the boat and most places we have looked at don't have the possibility for a shop that big (it will be no smaller than 30X30 with at least 2 10X10 overhead doors). Anyways we finally found one that was perfect. It's a four bedroom 2 bath and we were actually willing to settle for a 3 bedroom 2 bath. It's on 2 acres which is perfect because it's plenty of room to build the shop but it's not so much land that it would be a pain to take care of. Also it's in the school district that we want, and this is the hardest part to get to line up with us because 90% of this school district is in town and we are wanting to live in the country. Not to mention all the other things that this house has that we want like a jetted tub and a huge walk in closet that is in the bathroom rather than in the bedroom, the master bathroom has two sinks which is also big for us. The master bedroom is huge, it's actually bigger than the living room. Anyways it was at the absolute top of what we were wanting to spend but with some bickering back and forth we struck a deal that both us and the seller can live with..............or so we thought. We reached the agreement yesterday and our agent offered to have us draw up and sign the contract then and have it faxed to him but he said "we already have reached an agreement and my wife is out of town so let's just sign the contract in the morning". So this morning we go and draw up the contract and sign in and our agent faxes it to the seller (who is also the listing agent). He has another agent call her and says that we need to bring our best and final offer because he has another offer coming in . Now I realize that he hasn't signed the contract yet and a verbal agreement isn't legal binding but this has me beyond pissed! That is nothing short of crooked and I don't appreciate him playing these games at all. There is some doubt about whether there really is another offer coming in or if he is just trying to squeeze a few more thousand dollars out of us, but it doesn't matter because we are not going up another penny. Our agent has tried to call him every 20 minutes since 3:30 this afternoon and he won't even answer her calls, what a coward! What if we really did make a better offer and he won't answer the phone. Anyways I know that going up in our price is an option but although we could do it, we refuse to on principal alone..........he already accepted our offer so why should we? The biggest problem is that of the 30 some houses we have looked at this is one of 2 that would work for us, except the other one ended up being in a flood zone and that turned into a very heated argument with the sellers because they couldn't understand why we would back out of that house just because the creek might flood my shop one day lol. There just aren't many houses that line up with our needs and then to get jacked around like this when we finally find the home that we love is more than my temper can handle. Does anyone have any experience with real estate and maybe have any ideas on what we can do, ideally I would love to threaten to run this guys name into the ground and scare him into honoring his agreement out of fear that his job will suffer in the end. But I am not sure what I could do to bring a real estate agent to his knees if he calls my bluff. Any legal ideas? Britney and I are just sick over this deal. I realize a verbal agreement won't hold up in court but at the same time he should be held accountable somehow.