Sunday, March 25, 2007

Real Estate (or should I say Fictional Estate)

So I'm trying to sell my townhome. When it had been on the market for eleven days, someone offered me $40k less than the asking price for it. They offered us this verbally, and my agent said, verbally, in terms that I thought were much too polite, that the offer was, "too low." I don't want to go into numbers, but if Target has a sale like that, the damn thing is on clearance. Real clearance, with the little red price sticker.

I know it's a buyer's market, but you do still have to pay for property. I'm a motivated seller, but I'm not, like, wanted by the law. I'm not on a slow boat to Panama. I'm motivated, not at gunpoint. Nonetheless, these people wrote up a formal offer and sent it to us, telling us that we had something like eight hours to respond.

I don't know if you've ever done the whole offer/counteroffer thing, but it involves signing a whole bunch of paperwork and, if you happen to live in a different state than your real estate, a whole lot of faxing. So I just paid $25 and spent a Saturday in a public fax shop to put together a counteroffer to this clearly fantastic insult of an "offer."

Today the agent phoned my agent and said that they wanted to put in a counteroffer for $39,999.99 less than the asking price just to prove to us how rude we were for wasting their time. Wow. Okay. Because we told you before you went and did the formal offer that there did not appear to be any way we could come to an agreement. I think my agent suggested to your agent that forclosures might be a good place to look for the kind of deal your client wanted. But we wasted your time.

Oh, crap--I promised that the blog would be 30% less bitter, didn't I? Ummmm. Okay, give me a second.

But every cloud has a silver lining. For one thing, the nasty bad people were so insulted that they are never going to darken my doorstep, inbox, or voicemail again. And for another thing, today my agent showed my little townhouse to a woman and her dad, and they loved it. They even complimented the two-story purple wall extensively. They sound so damn adorable that I'm thinking of coming down on my price. Because along with my bitter, bitter attitude, I have a soft spot for people who like purple. And because that whole saying about how you catch more flies with honey? So true.

(Wait, am I a FLY in that metaphor? I have got to buy some beer before I blog again.)

2 comments:

nkilkenny said...

Honestly, they probably think they can take advantage of you too because you're selling it from a distance. It's hard to wash the twinge off of yourself when you have to deal with real-estate sales.

Unknown said...

Hey Katy,

Hope you're doing well. Just catching up on your blog. We're getting ready to list the Miner Manse (you can read about my garage sale at www.minerbrothers.com) so let the lowballs roll! Hope the purple wall people snap it up.
Matt Miner