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

really can't afford. It's time to sit down with your broker and take a
serious look at the listings.

The listings are computerized lists, or "listings," of all the houses
that all the brokers in your region have been trying to sell since the Carter
administration. Listings are always written in a special real estate code.
For example, this listing:

CHARMING RANCH, 2 full, 4BR, 3B, 2TD, land scaped, newly
renovated. ...

can be decoded as follows:

1. Rooms the size of nasal spray cartons
2. IN URBAN AREAS: No attic or basement. IN RURAL AREAS: Also cattle have
wintered in the foyer.
3. Four bedrooms
4. Three bathrooms
5. Two turtle doves
6. Extensive comical lawn statuary including minority groups holding lanterns;
also large, permanent, fully mechanized, spectacularly illuminated
display of Santa's Workshop
7. The walls have been pretty well scraped clean in the room where the demonic
beings from another dimension came through the TV set and caused the
previous occupants' heads to explode.

Study the listings carefully and make a note of any houses that look
right for you, so your broker can confirm that they were all sold just that
morning. This is actually good, because it will help to get you into the
proper highly desperate frame of mind where you will do almost anything to get
a house, including paying large sums of money you really don't have to people
you really don't know for reasons you really aren't sure of. Which is the
essence of real estate.


CHAPTER 2
How To Pretend To Look Knowledgeably At Houses


Okay. Now we have reached the most exciting part, the very essence of
home buying: actually going inside specific houses so we can examine them and
fail to notice major defects.

One important warning before you get started: You want to be on the alert
for the Helpful Seller. This is the kind of seller who, the instant you enter
his home, leaps out and attaches himself to you, like an intestinal parasite,
only worse, because intestinal parasites, for all their flaws, do not feel a
great need to point out every single one of their home's numerous features,
whereas the Helpful Seller does.