Two in the bush...disappointment...riding the real estate roller coaster

It has been a week of ups and downs. We're (I'm) down right now. We had the one offer. We got a second offer. We decided to not go with the first offer because it was so low that we'd have to dig up $12,000 to sell the house. That's just a lot of money to sell something, isn't it? That's a huge chunk of my yearly salary. The other person couldn't come any higher. If we cut the realtors out of it altogether, we'd manage to then only owe $5000. And somehow that seems more palatable, but we can't cut out realtors--we need them. We tried selling this house on our own for about 10 months FSBO, and we got nothing but nibble after nibble without a serious offer. For anyone keeping track, we've now had the house on the market for 22 months. A house we aren't living in.

The second offer came in yesterday, but it had a couple of glitches in it that made it tough to take...those issues left way too much up in the air. But in looking at their offer, I thought that the up-in-the-air issues could all be solved by asking them to get a letter from their mortgage company since they had a meeting scheduled for today. They, oddly, responded that they would be in touch and that they wanted a response to their offer by 5:00 today. Then, they never got in touch today. So while I thought things would be clarified today, they are now muddied by a lack of communication. And we're stuck waiting with no recourse.

In the meantime, my realtor e-mailed me that another woman who was previously interested in my house saw another house today, fell in love, and is making an offer on that. That easy. Why the hell can't it be that easy for us? WHY? What do we have to do here?