My wife and I are in the process of buying a home. We have a realtor that is helping us find our home and last weekend we placed our first offer on a house. Since then we've gone back and forth a couple of times with counter-offers. The house is owened by 4 people (parents and son/daughter-in-law). The parents live in the house and the son lives in a different state. Our agent submitted our offers to the seller's agent and that agent has been coming back to ours with counteroffers via email and telephone.

Yesterday we thought we had reach an agreeable price and we were made aware of it by our realtor after she had spoken with the seller's realtor supposedly. It was a matter of finalizing the deal by signing the contract. Today we got a call from our realtor stating that the son (also an owner) contacted his agent and mentioned that now he wants more money for the house. In return his agent contacted our agent to tell her that and she in turn told us. Our agent says that she's shocked and actually fought with the seller's agent for a while because she thought yesterday we had reached an agreement. We are beyond mad because we thought that these counteroffers, although they were taking place verbally, they were still concrete offers. Basically one of the owners (the son) now feels that since we're asking for $5K from the sellers at closing, that he's not only going to jack up the price that much but also going to ask for the original listing price. Nevertheless we are outraged by this!

Our agent says that she has emails going back between her and the seller's agent and we don't feel that they have the right to back out of a deal that it is very obvious their agent had cleared with them before offering it to us, so right now we're just arguing with our agent, that in our opinion should be fighting this as well. She said she will do that, but I'm not too confident at this time.

So my question is, can anyone tell us if we have any recourse on this? Isn't the verbal agreement good enough?

Any help will greatly be appreciated!