In Which We Learn That "Negotiation" Is Something Besides What You Do On A Curvy Road, Or A Tactic To Squeeze Out More Vacation Days

Labor Day came and went, fall intervened, we became busy with the baseball postseason (if you haven't seen this YouTube, it's one of the greatest ever; let it unfold and watch what happens) and before we knew it, we'd done no serious looking for houses. Michael was getting skeptical that it would ever happen. By November, however, we had begun searching online again. A few of the same places were still for sale. Some of the others had been pulled off the market.

Just before Thanksgiving we looked at a two-family house that was in our price range and close to the subway. By this point the sun was setting early in the evening, so we saw it in the dark. The primary unit was OK — my memory of it was that it had a bunch of strange rooms cobbled together and a lot of sewing equipment; it looked kind of like a sweatshop if a sweatshop were run by an older lady from Queens. The secondary unit, on the other hand, was a sight to behold.

If you remember what I wrote about the thrill of spying on people's lives when you are shown a home, and how that thrill quickly dissipates, well for us it was back again. The secondary apartment was on the ground floor, but as the house was built into a hill, it was basically a basement apartment. There were low ceilings, pipes stretching around the walls, "windows" that didn't appear to supply natural light and a makeshift bathroom of some sort that seemed to be held together by clumpy plaster. But the real items of interest were what constituted the tenant's belongings.

As near as we could tell, he was an immigrant vendor of some sort. An inventory of cheap purses was piled in the main room, near a cushion of the type that you might see at a hookah lounge. The contents of the bedroom escape me, but the window treatments seemed to be in a permanent state of drawn. You could see Michael's will start to break.

"I couldn't possibly live in here," Michael whispered as we walked back up the creaky stairs from the lower level. We all got that. He didn't have to say it.

The listing agent, probably sensing that this house wasn't for us, mentioned that he had another house he could show us.

This house was on the same street as the dilapidated Mets house, and would probably be in much better shape. We saw it after Thanksgiving and while none of us were particularly enamored with it, it had all the trappings of a good investment: a garage out back, a location on a nice street and working plumbing. The agent mentioned that there was room to expand, which an investor was considering. It was small, which was the one drawback for us.

"There is another offer," the listing agent told us as we left him. "Just so you know."

We made our offer to the agent. Now, if you go online and look at recommendations for where to begin a negotiation, the common advice is to start 20 percent below listing price and work your way up from there. Twenty percent sounds reasonable if the home is listed for, say, $150,000: $120,000 doesn't sound too ridiculous as a starting number. But at some point, 20 percent might start to sound absurdly low. Maybe not at the upper end, but somewhere between. We were at that absurdly low point.

The listing agent shared our initial offer with the owner, who countered with a number closer to three percent off the listing price. He added that our offer was the lowest offer the owners had ever gotten for the house.

What's more, the listing agent explained, the other offer was in the neighborhood of nine percent off the listing price and that they had 30-40 percent available to put down. Those people were serious enough, he added, to bring a contractor to the house to get a sense of the work that might have to go in to expanding the house.

Further, if we were to raise our offer to match the other one, it would be easy to see where the owner would go: Ten percent for us versus 30-40 percent to the other, it was a no-brainer for the seller. He counseled us to raise our offer to five percent of the listing price.

By this point it was clear to me at least that we were being used as leverage to extract more money from the likely buyer. I had to Google whether this was a legitimate real estate practice, but it was, though I found some interesting discussion about it (here's a more current article about it). And seeing that we were not as crazy about this house, it didn't make sense for us to try to outbid someone else for it. We raised our offer to something still in our ballpark but lower than the other offer supposedly on the table. We never heard anything from them.

I see now online that the house went in contract in February and eventually closed in April for just under three percent off the asking price.

Now this wouldn't all mean much, but the listing agent did happen to mention that his brother had a place that he was selling also in the neighborhood, just a few blocks away. Which just goes to show that it always makes sense to make the effort, just in case one door (literally!) closes and another one (literally!) opens.