Two offers on the same house happens randomly, like two scientists with same discovery.

Buyers sometimes find it difficult to believe that two offers on the same house can happen at the same time. Part of that is probably ingrained in people to believe that they are special and different from everybody else. Like that one guy on the TBS TV show People of Earth whose dream was to be hijacked to a spaceship and assured he was special. But the truth is nobody is all that special. We are more alike than we are different. And if you want to buy that particular home in Sacramento, you can bet dollars to doughnuts that another buyer is thinking the very same thing at precisely the same time.

It doesn’t matter if that house has been sitting on the market for a year, abandoned and neglected, cobwebs hanging about the door frame, the minute you want to make an offer, so does somebody else. I used to think this sort of happenstance was just a freak in nature, but I’m realizing now it is not. Two offers on the same house is more common than anybody wants to believe. Especially buyers who don’t seem to trust anybody nowadays. They immediately leap to: the listing agent is lying. Some listing agents are unethical, but liars are few and far between.

This came to mind because I’ve been reading The God Effect: Quantum Entanglement, Science’s Strangest Phenomenon, by Brian Clegg. It’s a book published 11 years ago, but just recently came to my attention when I stumbled across Quantum Entanglement. Truth is, I pretty much ignored physics and science for decades and only now am beginning to realize it’s a fascinating subject. I could not wrap my head around the fact that two particles separated by a long distance could be linked to such an extent that they react simultaneously in an identical manner.

I won’t bore you with the details, but it’s possible you might find it fascinating as well. Another interesting aspect in this book is how so many discoveries were made at the same time in our history. Just like you can have two offers on the same house, you can have two scientists coming to the same conclusion at the same time, even when the thing discovered is not necessarily popular at the time. Just like fashion, the book says, science has its trends. Quantum Entanglement came to be at a time when it was not popular.

To give you an example of how unrelated scientists in their own worlds can arrive at the same conclusion, we can look no further to when both Newton and Leibniz discovered calculus at the same time. When Leibniz objected to Newton claiming priority, the Royal Society set up an 11-man committee to make a determination. The report named Newton. What you don’t know is Newton was President of the Royal Society and he wrote the decision. Sort of like our unscrupulous politics in the White House today.

Another simultaneous development was the lightbulb.

Joseph Swan came up with the lightbulb eight months before Edison, without filing for a patent. When Edison developed the lightbulb on his own, he thought Swan a fraud. So Edison sued. This time, Swan was awarded priority and the court forced Edison to set up a joint company, The Edison and Swan United Electric Company, to market the invention.

So the next time you run into a situation where you hear there are two offers on the same house, just think of science. It’s random but not as random as you might want to believe.