A Game Of Cat And Mouse

Everything is flawed. A BMW may have many perks, but it only has to lack a coin tray to be imperfect. Pamela Anderson is cute, I’m told, but she’s permanently diseased. Malibu has an amazing wave, but it’s crawling with pricks. So, anyone who’s ever been on the market for a car, a woman or a sweet surf spot knows that we tend to overlook the cons and really play up the pros.

BMWs scream between 4500 and 6000 rpm, and with that power, we’ll pocket the change. Pam will do things wives won’t, and she isn’t camera shy, so we’ll get all the immunizations we need. And if we just become one of those assholes at Malibu, then everything’s gonna be alright.

The chances of a house being everything we want are astronomically against. If only the upstairs had better insulation. If only it had a farm sink in the kitchen. If only the basement had a full height ceiling. We may rationalize and we may even fix things we don’t like, but dammed to hell if we aren’t going to take those imperfections to the negotiating table to leverage down what we’re willing to pay.

And this is where the disconnect in the real estate game takes place. Sellers don’t want to hear about the flaws. They don’t even want to face them, especially if they’re selling something that isn’t as strong. So sellers and buyers circle the ring for quite some time before engaging in the actual skin to skin combat, and neither wants to engage from the weaker position.

Take the house we’re looking at. The sellers came onto the market at a pretty inflated price of $550,000. Can’t blame them, I guess. Fools and money do part from time to time. And there’s no shortage in Seattle of fools. Or money. But by coming out at such a high-hopes price, they’re risking losing an amount of credibility when the house doesn’t move.

Reducing the price of anything carries an amount of desperation, a wacky clown-and-balloons-sales-event flavor. A Ford dealer will have a “Super Slammy Sales Saturday,” but BMW is more likely to treat their inventory reduction efforts with much more care, and with a deeper voice, perhaps an English accent. Doing so retains their credibility, their brand bargaining power, the power that BMW doesn’t bargain, because their car is worth all the money they’re asking.

After two price drops, to $529k and then to $499k, the clown is in front of the house we want to buy, dancing in a yellow polka dot suit and flipping a sign in the air. There’s a string of balloons stretching into the sky, and happy families are jogging along the sidewalk to see.

But the clown is really a young wildebeest limping around in the front yard. The balloons are drops of blood scenting the air. And the happy families are people like us sensing a weakness in their game. And the last thing the seller wants to do is sit at the table where they have to face the claws and teeth. Best-case scenario is that new and friendlier animals happen along unaware of the damaged and vulnerable seller.

The seller knows we want the house. And if we’re the only ones at the table, and after 120 days on the market, it’s unlikely they’ll chase us away entirely. And knowing they’ve flip flopped between a clown sale and a special investment incentive, we can smell the panic.

In the waiting game, they’ve come back with the idea of a pre inspection, meaning, getting an inspection done before the offer goes in. Tim explained it’s intended to get all the facts on the table so that the seller has a grasp of the Net, and doesn’t have to take a hit to the agreed upon selling price during the post offer acceptance inspection.

Sounds fishy to me. What I see is our paying for an inspection so that they will know what’s coming when a real inspection hits, avoid a sale falling through, get the info, patch up what the inspection finds, don’t negotiate on anything and we’re left footing the bill.

That would be easy to believe, if I could convince myself that the seller hasn’t already done an inspection on their own. With half a million oysters on the line, how could they not prepare by doing an actual inspection themselves?

But then, there’s always plausible deniability. What they can claim they don’t know about, they can sell. Meaning they can sell a bad electrical system if they can claim they never knew about it. An inspection would blow that. Wouldn’t it?

I spoke with Tim, and said that if the seller will put out there that a pre inspection will bring them to actually negotiate, we’ll do it, because then, if they don’t work on the price after saying they would, that would be sticky, right? Right?

Lia’s aching to get to the table with the sellers. But the game of cat and mouse continues. Today she came across another ad from a different agent offering the same house. Same price. What does that mean?