"HOMES" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barry Dave)

you hate the house, and the mere thought of it makes you physically ill. Your
opening offer should convey this. It should be worded as follows: "We don't
want your house, so we will give you X number of dollars for it, including all
major appliances and the children." (Note that you should not name a specific
amount. You should actually use the term "X number of dollars," so as to
avoid tipping your hand.) The broker will take your offer to the seller, who
at this point has a number of options, such as:

1. He can accept your offer.
2. He can reject your offer.
3. He can give back the dinette set, the pool table, AND the Epcot Center
vacation in exchange for whatever is behind curtain number two.

Another possibility is that he will make a counteroffer, which your
broker will bring back for you to consider. "We don't want to sell the
house," it might say. "We only put it on the market because we enjoy having
total strangers come around and test-flush all our toilets. But we are
willing to let it go for Y number of dollars, plus you can have little
Deirdre, provided you raise her in a religious environment. We get the
microwave."

And then you send the broker back with another offer, and they send you
another counteroffer, and so on until the broker, his fingers bloodied from
typing up the various negotiating positions, drops dead in the street from
exhaustion, which is the signal for the buyer and the seller to settle on a
price equal to the original asking price minus about five percent. This is
the price that everybody always winds up at, and if we all just agreed on it
at the beginning, there would be a lot less hassle and inconvenience in the
form of dead brokers. But we have to ask ourselves if this would really be
such a desirable outcome.

In any event, now that you and the seller have set a price, you need to
sign the agreement of sale, which should be worded in standard legal
terminology, as follows:

Standard Agreement of Sale

WHEREAS the Seller wants to sell, and the Buyer wants to
buy,
and they think they got a price that's not too low or too
high;
and the Buyer gave the Seller a down payment to hold,
now he'll try to get a mortgage 'fore they BOTH grow old;
and the Seller's gonna see if he got termites in his place
'cause if he does, the Buyer's gonna tear it right up in
his face;
but if everything is cool and nobody's late,
then the deal will go down on the Settlement Date.

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