Ant Buys Houses review: Real estate purchase

Six months ago I started receiving calls from “Ant" concerning buying our home for cash. I eventually accepted their offer but they asked later if they might have a short period of time to try to “flip” the house to another buyer. I did agree to this but we also agreed and it was clearly and repeatedly stated in our contract that “Ant” would be required to put down an "earnest money” deposit to hold the house, that would be forfeited in case they pulled out of the agreement. This is normal procedure. We agreed that “Ant" had one week after signing the contract for due diligence to both have the property professionally inspected, and conduct a walk through, which they did with their own contacts. For this week only, they could also pull out of the contract without any penalty. After this, they were contractually obligated to honor the terms of the contract which clearly specifies that after this one week due diligence period they could not pull out of the contract without losing their "earnest money” deposit.

Over the following month, they asked me for three different variations in the contract which I obliged but none of these “addendums”, altered their obligation to forfeit the “earnest money” deposit in case they broke the contract. After almost two months, I find out from THEIR title company, that they had decided unilaterally to pull out of the deal. I was not initially concerned at this time about the "earnest money" deposit because I had received confirmation from Sydney Jenkins, the officer at “Ant” appointed to my case that she had already sent the wire to their Title Company AND SHE ALSO SENT ME A COPY OF THE WIRE RECEIPT!

Then, later, I also hear from “Ant’s” local real estate agent Dionisio from Ancona Real Estate that not only had “Ant” unilaterally decided to cancel the contract without letting me know directly, but that they had no intention to forfeit the earnest money deposit as required by the contract. I contacted Anthony, the owner, and at first he also assured me that the earnest money had been deposited to the title company, just as Sydney had previously lied to me. Then, finally, Anthony comes clean with two false and ridiculous excuses that in the first week of the contract, more than 6 weeks previously, I had not allowed a second walk through of my property and that the house had not passed inspection. Both of these excuses were 100% FALSE and RIDICULOUS because Anthony didn’t invent these lies until long AFTER the due diligence period had expired and AFTER asking me to sign the three addendums in the weeks following that same expiration. In other words they blatantly came up with this nonsense only after advertising my house for 2 months on the open market with THEIR local real estate agency hoping to flip it for a quick profit and never actually intending to purchase it at all, even though they repeatedly wrote in both the contracts and their addendums that they were the “buyer” of the property. When they couldn’t make a quick profit by flipping it, they brazenly violated the contract inventing out of thin air two ridiculous lies. To this day, they still refuse to pay the “earnest money” deposit as is laid out clearly in our contract.