@rojo – This sounds almost EXACTLY like the situation we had. We made what we felt was a very fair offer on a house, slightly less and they didn’t counter.
We were very surprised, and communicated this through our Realtor to the sellers. We got back this lonnnng email about how they’d put so much effort into the house (blah blah blah) – and I remember being really unhappy at the time..because I thought that house was “the one”.
Time went by, we found a MUCH better house and our offer was accepted. Honestly, the house we found (and bought) was far nicer and looking back, I’m eternally grateful they didn’t accept our offer.
After we were in contract to buy our house the other guy came back (months later) and said: “OK, we’ve reconsidered and would like to discuss a counter offer with you.” We declined—we were just 2 weeks away from closing on our home.
In our case we found out long after the fact that there was more to the story. It turned out that a man and his parents had bought an “investment” house (I guess they watched one too many “Flip This House” episodes on TLC and got big ideas)..and as the son worked on the house (putting in new appliances, painting rooms, putting in new carpet) he started liking the investment house more than his own house in a nearby town. When it came time to sell he kept pushing his parents to not accept offers..and it was ultimately because he had an ulterior motive. He wanted the house.
He ended up selling his other house and convincing his parents to sell him the house at a bargain amount. So, they were NEVER going to sell at a fair market price to someone else..because the son was manipulating the situation.
So, move on and don’t worry about it. Who knows..maybe they think the job in the new city isn’t going to work out and are having cold feet about selling the house. Maybe they are thinking about renting it out as a backup plan in case they want to settle there again in the future. You can’t know—but what you CAN tell about their failure to counter offer is that they are not truly serious about selling.