Dave Barry's Homes and Other Black Holes Read Free Page B

should take can be found in the excellent corporate training film
The Godfather
, where, as part of his negotiations with a movie producer, Marlon Brando gains a subtle psychological advantage by arranging to have the producer wake up in bed next to the head of a deceased horse. (It could havebeen worse; it could have been Marlon Brando.)
    This is not to suggest that to get a good price on a house, you need to go around decapitating domesticated animals. No indeed; wild animals are more than adequate for most residential transactions. But the point is, you have to be firm.
    At the outset of your negotiations, it is very important to create the impression that you don’t really want to buy the house at all, that in fact 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:
He can accept your offer.
He can reject your offer.
He can give back the dinette set, the pooltable, 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 toask 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.
CHORUS
Oooh baby baby
    We gon’ have a transaction tonight
    Of course I realize you probably don’t understand some of this “legal jargon,” but this is only because you are stupid. This is why it’s important to ask several lawyers to give you contradictory advice before you sign anything, including get-well cards.
    Meanwhile, however, it is time to go around to some banks and see if you can find one foolish enough to lend you some money.
ARE YOU FINANCIALLY FIT?
    The first thing you need to do is perform a detailed financial analysis of how much money you have versus how much you’re going to need to buy your house. The way you do this is you draw up what professional accountants call a “Balance Sheet,” which should look like this:

Money You Have
Savings account: $927.62
Checking account: