Well, this is after pharmacy school. By my wife and I are having a harrowing story buying a house right now.
A newly finished spec home in a very desirable location. The builder put it up on the market at a reasonable price, then I guess they need to free up cashflow for the next phase of construction, lowered the price by $20K after just 10 days. We looked at it, liked it, and market analysis showed the cheapest comparable sold for only $5K less than that. So we made an initial offer Saturday $25K lower than asking, figure haggling will yield a pretty good deal at roughly half of that. Their agent verbally told us that the builder will likely only be willing to move $9-12K off. So we figured a deal +/- $2-3K of our expectation is likely. Set an appointment for Monday with him for final negotiation and paper work. We even took our baby to check out the house in detail again on Sunday.
But comes today, the first thing we set down, the agent tells that that he made a mistake on Saturday. He claims that he wasn't aware the builder had lower the price $20K already, that the $9-12K off he told us was based on the previous price. That lame and cheap tactic got on my wrong side right away. We reiterated that our offer is based on the correct number, and his mistake has no bearing on our offer. So he "calls the builder", comes back with $6K off. We talked in private for a few. Our realtor agreed that it's a trick, but reinforced that the market analysis shows the house is indeed worth at least that, especially with good location and market slowly improving. But wife is right there with me saying: we came with the expectation of ~$12K off, if anything we must not budge just on principle of not give into dirty games. (God I love it when she throws it down right beside me). We went back in with the final offer, $11K off. He "calls his boss" again, say at most only $7K "my boss says there is literally no profit margin left, we would only be making like $100 bucks. Look around, we are not a distressed property"... We just said "no", shook hands just to be polite and walked out.
I was fuming driving all the way back. It felt like we just left a used car dealership. What a waste of 2 hours! Then roughly 6 PM, while I was at the gym working off some steam, our realtor calls me: the agent just contacted him and agreed to the last offer. I told him, have the agent spell out the "last offer" he's referring to, put on paper and fax it to me or else I'm not wasting another minute of my time on him. Our realtor will get that from him tomorrow morning. I'm not holding my breath, god knows what other shenanigan he might try to pull.
Anyway. That's my harrowing story for the day.
