Bad Weekend for the House

When asked how I was doing this morning, all of my willpower was required not to reply in an Eric Cartman impression "Well, I'm pissed off!" (Pardon the "French.") Perhaps that isn't the ideal description of my overall mood, but it sure is a great conversation starter. I'm not entirely sure what to make of the situation we went through over the weekend, but "crushed" and "disappointed" are family-friendly words that could be used.
I've blogged for over a year on the misadventures of trying to get our house sold. We ran up against what looked like 3 contracts with the same people for the sale of our house. The first person came through several weeks ago. She quickly came back with an offer. We counter-offered. She countered. We countered. She disappeared for a week. Our Realtor kept calling her agent, but got the feeling that they were playing games. She came back a week or so later through her agent and we began negotiations again. I've said before, we're selling the house at a loss and we know that. We went back and forth a couple of times, then she disappeared once again. Her agent wouldn't return calls to our agent, or if she could be reached, she just gave some blather. We finally went back to her with an acceptance of her lowest offer, which would exhaust our financial reserves to get out of the house. We heard nothing.
We had several showings along the way. One person who came through turned out to be the daughter of the woman who started and disappeared twice. She came through with a Realtor from our agent's brokerage. She began to list her home with that agent. We weren't sure why they wanted to run another family member through another agent, but we went through the offer process and came to an offer that we could accept with a contingency so all we had to do was sign contracts. While this was going on, we had yet another showing. This showing turned out to be the agent who showed the house to the first person. We weren't sure why, and she didn't leave a card like Realtors are supposed to do so something seemed shaky. We only knew who it was because our Realtor checked the log book. We found out later that the first person came back through with her Realtor to show her sister the house at the same time that her daughter was supposed to be signing a contract on the house with another Realtor.
OK, I'm doing the best I can to lay out some details without giving away anybody's identification or confidentiality, if any exists. On Thursday, as I was inching my way home down 42 in weekend shore traffic (there should be a law that idiots driving to the Jersey shore for the weekend should have to go down Thursday night so they don't interfere with those of us trying to get home from work on Friday) I got a call from one of the brokers that they managed to nail down an offer from the original woman. The offer would be the lowest price we could accept, with no contingency, and closing on August 1. That would make things tight, but we could do it. We told my in-laws, and started busting our butts getting their house ready to move into so early. Throughout the weekend, I stayed in touch with the broker (my Realtor was on vacation, so I've been dealing with her broker who was working on our case in the interim.) The broker was working on getting this deal to a signed contract, which kept getting pushed off. The woman claimed that she needed to sign a lease on her house. Then, after being put off all weekend, the broker had to ping her agent several times. Her agent responded that her daughter had a baby with heart problems and the boyfriend left so she's not going to do anything until her daughter is settled. That worst part of this is, after almost going to contract 3 times with these people, we really are hesitant to believe this. It really doesn't matter; it's not our problem. It can't be our problem. Our problem is we need to sell a house, and we were so close, only to have all of our hopes dashed once again.
At this point, I'm at about the end of my patience for these people. Unfortunately, they're the only serious interest we've had in more than a year of trying to sell the house, but all they've seemingly done is jack us around. It's possible they are going through some life-challenging situations, but so are we, and we don't like being jacked around. What really pisses me off is that while they've been jacking us around, they've had three tours of the house. Each showing involved several hours of work to clean up, plus if we were home we had to walk down the street while the showing went on, so all of this totals more than seven total hours of cleaning and inconvenience. It almost seems like they've been playing us. I'm so frustrated at this point that I'm ready to tell my Realtor that we're not dealing with them again, no matter which family member or agent they go through. I'm tempted to say that if they do come back, we will accept only our full list price AND I want a contract signed within 24 hours, and if they're not willing to do that, then get lost. My wife is more tolerant of them screwing with us, so I may tell our Realtor to call her if they come back with an offer, but I want a signed contract within 24 hours no matter what.
At least we got to live in three days of euphoria thinking this was all over. No we're back to square one.