For reasons too complex to go into here, we decided to sell our perfectly good house and buy a different one. We ran about looking at houses and found one to our liking. The owners wanted a bit much for it, so we offered less, and the typical American-style haggling ensued. During one part of the haggling process, Pilar asked me, "What do you think we'll get it for?"
"352" I said, for number had been floating about in my head.
We did a bit more of the back-and-forth, and came up with a selling price of 356, with seller to contribute 4 to closing costs. 352.
We accepted this deal, as did the sellers, and everything was going along great. Then I got a call at work from my wife who had gone with the home inspector to look over the new place.
"We've got a problem with the inspection."
Turns out, the water pipes in this home were made of polybutylene, the so-called "pipe of the future" that was supposed to be better than copper. Builders liked using it, because it shaved approximately $1500 off the cost of a home. It was later discovered that chlorine in public drinking water supplies cause these pipes to fail, catastrophically, from the inside out. No warning. Just an inch of water in your kitchen and bathroom one morning. Or a waterfall gurgling merrily inside your walls. Oh yes, these pipes had been the subject of one of the largest class action lawsuits in US history.
As you can imagine, this began a second flurry of negotiations, visits from plumbing contractors, and late night discussions. Our Realtor heard from the listing agent that the sellers believed that the pipes weren't a problem, because their plumber had told them they were all set. Besides, they said, THEY'D never had any problems with the polybutylene pipes. We didn't derive nearly as much comfort from this as they did.
The Realtors did their thing over the phone, and it sounded like the sellers thought we were being a bunch of fussbudgets. We began looking at other houses. We didn't bother writing up an addendum for a few days, because we assumed it wasn't worth the electrons. The sellers' Realtor called our Realtor and asked if one might be forthcoming. He told us that she told him they were willing to deal. We countered with an addendum calling for the complete re-piping of the house, plus a few other fiddly bits that the inspector had discovered.
A few days later, we got a counter to that counter that offered to pay half. That night we agreed to walk. Even our Realtor felt the same way. However, the next morning I awoke with a number floating about in my head.
345
I talked it over with my wife, and told her of the mystical number. She said, "Well 346 would be an even ten grand price reduction which would cover the cost of the repairs plus some other stuff."
So we wrote up another addendum and sent it off.
(Somewhere in here, I actually wrote a mini essay on the logical fallacy of anecdotal evidence and fired it off to my Realtor, in hopes that he might be able to use it in some way.) Click here if you would like to read my mini essay.
That night, the sellers countered to the counter of the counter addendum with an offer to fix the fiddly bits AND give a price reduction equal to the cost of fixing the pipes. We had a deal. It came very close to the magical number floating in the mystical mists of my sleepy brain.
345
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