July 15, 2004

Negotiation

Monday afternoon I was tired, excited, a little nervous and ready to get the show on the road. We've been looking at houses for a month or two, and already I'm sick of it. As I mentioned in a previous post, the more I looked at houses, the more I liked the first house we saw. Archi-Sapper felt the same way. So we decided to go for it and make an offer on the house.

We met our realtor at the coffeeshop near his office. I was uncharacteristically late, as I had gotten sidetracked at the office. They were most of the way through their iced coffees by the time I arrived and saw them sitting on the front porch of the coffee shop. Our realtor suggested we walk through the house one more time and see if there were any conditions we wanted to put on our offer.

We headed over to the house, our realtor got the key and we let ourselves in. Archi-Sapper knows more than any human should about construction, so he studied every wall, corner, nook and cranny to find defects. Being the more technical of the two of us, I wandered through the rooms and thought about what colors I wanted to paint the walls. After about a half hour touring the property, I was about to sweat through my business suit, and begged them to leave so we could write out our offer back at the coffee shop -- back in civilization. Back in a place where the air conditioning was turned on.

We sat down with the forms and talked about the amount of our offer. I wanted to make a low-ball offer and negotiate our way back up. Archi didn't want to insult them with an offer that was too low, but like me, he also wanted to save money. We ended up making the lowest offer we could come up with that was still reasonable, and our agent said, "They won't take this. They'll probably make a counter-offer." That wasn't a problem with us, so we signed the offer and headed home.

Yesterday I went to the downtown branch of our bank -- you know, the place where the little old ladies get dressed up to go to when they need to do their banking? That place. After two hours, we were pre-approved for the loan. I am still floored than anyone is willing to loan us more than $10.

I trudged back through downtown to my office and tried to get some work done. By the end of the day, I had completely forgotten about the house, the meeting with the bank, the offer. . . everything. I forgot until Archi-Sapper called me.

He heard from our realtor.

They accepted our offer.

Posted by Kitty at July 15, 2004 10:11 AM

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