Real Estate Roundabout

If you have been to Europe you are familiar with traffic roundabouts. Roundabouts are creeping into our North American psyche as a way to keep traffic moving and reduce emissions. Generally I am in favour of roundabouts, or rotaries as they are sometimes called, but they take getting used to and it takes some courage to enter the fray. The biggest problem with them is the disparity between those drivers who know how they work and those who don't. Personally I have a little trouble getting onto down escalators, I hesitate, and sometimes that throws off the flow of people behind me. That hesitation going into a roundabout ( not me!) can cause an accident or at least some blaring horns and waving arms. And then there is the getting off bit. When we first were driving in England ( I say 'we' only because Jim was with me. We agreed years ago that he does NOT drive in England) twenty odd years ago there were occasions when we just kept driving around and around till we figured out which exit to take. I have to say that Jim's map-reading skills weren't good back then and that our driving stress has been greatly reduced by our GPS. He will be asking why I had to say it, but there we are!

So, we are on the real estate roundabout. We had no trouble launching into the circle, having had lots of prior experience, and we know our preferred exit, but we are in convoy with a couple who seem nervous. We have a pending agreement on the sale of the house, but it's a conditional agreement and that means it could 'collapse' at any point. The first potential exit looms this weekend when the first conditions are supposed to be removed: building inspection and financial approval for the buyers. The second exit is the great unknown of  "conditional on the sale of the buyers house", which might never happen. In the meantime we are still for sale, open to unconditional offers in which case the original people have 48 hours to come up with the money or exit. If they don't sell their house by July 28 and no other buyer enters the roundabout we could end up with a lot of real estate and no money; not the exit we are hoping for.