About the condo...
Naïve me. I think: if I let the builder/seller know how much I want that particular condo, he will sell it to me at a price I can afford. Why wouldn’t he? I want to buy it, he wants to sell it – the marketplace will push this into my lap, right?
Instead, it is, I think, like this: seller knows how much I want the condo. I have admitted that there is no other unit in all of Madison, nay, Dane County, that comes even close to the price, size, quality of this particular place. Rather than feeling honored and puffed up by my words of great praise, I am thinking that he used the information against me when the counter offer came in ----- at a sum greater than the original asking price!
Now, some would be discouraged by this. Not me! I see this as an opportunity to educate the builder/seller in the true worth of reaching out to people like me. I want to teach him how to make things happen out there, so that all are satisfied. I owe him that much.
In the meantime, I am condo-negotiating left and right, working endlessly at all hours of the night and feeling that one more day of this pace will permanently crack me, scar me, undo me in some profound way.
Or not. Hearty Polish peasant stock here. I give thanks to my roots.
16 hours ago
Heh, heh.
ReplyDeleteI think we bid $70k over asking for our house.
I don't know what the market's like now, but when we were shopping, the nice places were offered way under-market, and the crappy ones were offered over. That way the nice ones go into over-bidding and the crappy ones get whatever they can.
Good for you for being hearty. I found the housing market almost more than I could bear too.
If you truly plan to live there forever, or for a very long time, the price makes no difference. Just pay what you need to and get on with it.
ReplyDeleteThe counter-offer may suggest that there's another buyer on the hook. That would be worth finding out.
ReplyDeleteAdmitting a strong desire for the unit, when you're not dealing with an individual seller who might be moved to accept your offer by suggesting that you won't undo their paint color choices, was probably not that great of a move -- willingness to walk away is, after all, the threat that drives the hard bargain.
Chuck, the Madison condo market is somewhere between glutted and massively glutted. While Nina's intended unit is not available in abundance, the building in question is considerably more than half empty, and there's a new building with a couple hundred units slated to go up directly across the street -- site work to start Any Day Now, occupancy in later '08. Nina's would-be building in question was priced close to the market peak, and is expensive by local standards.
Sixty-five does have a point that if you'll be there forever, paying too much isn't such a big deal in the long run. On the other hand, this is a terrible time to press the limits of affordability.
As for whether the place really is perfect, I would note that the floor is low and the layout gives the second BR no window, right? Regardless of that and your previous representations, I wouldn't respond with more than the asking price if your initial offer was below asking. If there isn't another bidder, my further response to the above-asking-price counter from the builder couldn't be published on a family blog.
While you may be able to offset a the white-box price a bit via the build-out, the market also would pay you a non-trivial amount of money to accept a pre-existing condo in a somewhat less desirable building.
Sorry about the comment-longer-than-the-post.
Tom: not sure what you mean by "the floor is low." That I am on third? The view is fine. The place is bright, with lots of sunlight. The asking price is significantly below comparable units elsewehere downtown or even on the east side, especially considering that it is 1250 square feet. They bumped up the price because I redesigned it. Expensively, according to them. It may be worth it to keep my design ideas in place.
ReplyDeleteI was confused -- I thought you were bidding on the white box and handling the build-out separately. I sent you an e-mail for clarification...
ReplyDelete