I have a similar story from buying a house almost a decade ago. My final firm offer was $350k, and the flipper/seller went with another offer that was only $5k

I have a similar story from buying a house almost a decade ago. My final firm offer was $350k, and the flipper/seller went with another offer that was only $5k more. Only problem was, my offer was bulletproof (I had the full amount of the down payment in cash at hand plus a pre-approved loan offer) and the other offer was not. You can see where this is going: The other buyer couldn't actually come up with the money and didn't get approved for a loan, and then I ended up buying the house for the original $350k several months later, after the flipper had lost a lot more than $5k in all the added actual costs and opportunity costs of holding onto that house for several more months and trying to close on it twice.