So after stewing all day, my wife decided she was going to call them and ask if they could somehow drop the lady who put down the deposit and let us buy it for $4000 instead.
So she called, and when the neighbor called back she explained that she had just crashed the car, scraping it against a parked UPS truck. The lady who was going to buy it was coming by to get her deposit back. We walked over and saw the scrape, and while it wasn't pretty, it wasn't horrible and wasn't super noticeable. So we told her to not put the car back up for sale, and that we would buy it. Woo hoo!
They had insurance, but they were leaving the country this week and the place their insurance works with needed 2 weeks to do the repairs. So we thought maybe they could just get the cash for the repair work and knock down our price by that much. That would have been awesome, but they have a clause in their contract prohibiting it. So we just had to figure out how much to knock the price down for the scrape. The estimate was $1800, but I don't think they wanted to sell the car for $2200. So we were in kind of a pickle.
Meanwhile, we took the car to our mechanic to see if there was anything bad about the car. The neighbors said they just spent $3000 on repairs and maintenance before selling it so we were hoping nothing important needed to be done. We found a mechanic we trust a couple years ago, so we wanted to know what he had to say.
He took a thorough look at it and... he said there was about $3015 more work that needed to be done. Son of a fucker. He said he could see they did get work done, but they replaced the catalytic converter and focused mostly on the front (new front tires and brakes) while the back of the car had issues. It needed new shocks, but shocks for this car are hard to find and are expensive. It also needed new rear brakes, a new battery, new spark plugs (which are hard to get at so they cost a lot in labor) and a differential leak fix. Fuck me.