I'm sorry to hear about your missing out on a sale. That behavior isn't limited to just Volvo owners, though--when my parents were looking to move into a new house four years ago, we were looking at and seriously considering buying an older but nicely-located house for about the same as we would sell our house. The owners, however, sold the house over a weekend without ever contacting us to see if we would make any sort of (counter-)offer (and we lived in the same town as these people!). We continued looking, and ultimately ended up finding a much sweeter deal, a house that would save us about $80K and had a swimming pool, 1000 more square feet than our current residence, and marshfront property. I think we are much happier in our current house than we would have been in the one we missed.

Moral: don't dwell too much over the missed sale. It sucks, but you very well might end up finding another deal ten times better!
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'89 244 GL -- 108,060 miles (see profile for info on car)