(Courtesy of Dave Barry, who has obviously been there/done that!)
At the outset of your negotiations, it is very important to create the impression that you don't really want to buy the house at all, that in fact you
hate the house, and the mere
thought of it makes you physically ill. Your opening offer should convey this. It should be worded as follows: 'We don't want your house, so we will give you X number of dollars for it, including all major appliances and your children.' The broker will take your offer to the seller, who at this point has a number of options, such as:
1. He can accept your offer.
2. He can reject your offer.
3. He can give back the dinette set, the pool, table, and the Epcot Center vacation in exchange for whatever is behind curtain #2.
Another possibility is that he will make a counteroffer, which your broker will bring back for you to consider. 'We don't want to sell the house', it might say. 'We only put it on the market because we enjoy having total strangers come around and test-flush all our toilets. But we are willing to let it go for Y number of dollars, plus you can have little Deirdre, providing you raise her in a religious environment. We get the microwave.'
And then you send the broker back with another offer, and they send you
another counteroffer, and so on until the broker, his fingers bloodied from typing up the various negotiating positions, drops dead in the street from exhaustion, which is the signal for the buyer and the seller to settle on a price equal to the original asking price minus about 5 percent. This is the price that everybody always winds up at, and if we all just agreed on it at the beginning, there would be a lot less hassle and inconvenience in the form of dead brokers. But we have to ask ourselves if this would really be such a desirable outcome.
In any event, now that you and the seller have set a price, you need to sign the agreement of sale, which should be worded in standard legal terminology, as follows:
Standard Agreement of Sale
WHEREAS the Seller wants to sell, and the Buyer wants to buy,
and they think they got a price that's not too low or too high;
and the Buyer gave the Seller a down payment to hold,
now he'll try to get a mortgage before they BOTH grow old;
and the Seller's gonna see if he got termites in his place
'cause if he does, the Buyer's gonna tear it right up in his face;
but if everything is cool and nobody's late,
then the deal will go down on the Settlement Date.
Chorus:
Oooh baby baby
We gon' have a transaction tonight
(so now you know
)
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