On Blogging and Negotiation

There haven’t been many entries here for a good reason - we were moving through negotiation phases over the purchase of the house.

One thing about negotiations - information is king. There have been Nobel prizes (in Economics) awarded to mathematicians who showed that the side with the most information will get the better of the deal.

There is probably a good chance that the person we bought the house from has never seen this blog. But on the off chance that the seller is internet/blog-savvy, we decided to keep this site a little on the dim side as we passed through these particular phases of house buying.

Negotiations are effectively over - we close at the end of July and at that point it is our intention to open up to our faithful readers the information that we were privy to as well as explain some of our tactics during the process. Both of us spent time attending Stanford Business school lectures on negotiation tactics, and I think that we were effectively able to put into practice some of the things we learned there. In the end we were able to get a house that met all of our criteria in a competitive market (the Boston/Cambridge area) at a price that was slightly below its appraisal value. Not only that - we did it on our first try. A little bit of luck was involved, to be sure, but as the saying goes “chance favors the prepared mind”.

Here are some highlights:

-how we used deadline based tactics to exclude competing offers

-how we used middle-ground bargaining to get price reductions

-how we used partial mortgage deals to force complete competitive deals out of the Gordon Gecko “greed is good” driven mortgage sales market.

In the end, I really don’t think we could have done any better with the financial resources we had and the market that was available. I’d hesitate to use the word perfect, as there were a small bumps along the way (including a brief period where it seemed that a broken doorbell would derail our wheeling & dealing!) but in the end our market research paid off and our process obviously works. We will be moving into our new home in a few weeks and no longer will our monthly living expenses go into a landlord’s pocket.