Educate yourself about new construction...

I know, I know, it’s a buyer’s market right now. However, that doesn’t make it any less challenging when someone makes an offer on one of our homes and they basically ask that we give it to them for cost. First, it is not common to have to negotiate on a newly constructed home. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but new construction “negotiation” just doesn’t function the same way as a used home.

One buyer couldn’t afford what we were offering. Instead of looking in a lower price bracket, he decided to offer us $25,000 less than our listing price. As flattered as we were that he loved our home, we just weren’t willing to drop our price that much. The poor guy could only get a loan for $300,000 and I think he was attempting to get a $50,000 unsecured loan but that still didn’t raise his offer to the place where we were willing to go.

Unfortunately, it is yet another situation where someone has made the grave mistake of looking in a bracket that gets their hopes up and they are dashed because they either don’t do their homework or, for some reason, they are willing to max out their buying power. Folks, risking foreclosure is not worth it!

Another offer we received recently asked us to finish one of our basements for free. Part of the reason why we don’t finish basements anymore is how expensive it is. The Realtor^® was apparently unaware of the expense and even asked why we would use drywall for the ceiling instead of a drop-ceiling.

I understand why she would think that the latter would be less expensive but the labor would be just as much, if not more than drywall and the materials may cost less but not by much. She was also anticipating a plumbing problem which I think is a poor way of buying a home. Why would one buy a home assuming that something would go wrong? If that is the case, you would probably not put any drywall up at all and all your walls and ceilings would be accessible to plumbing and electrical.

In the end, the Realtor^® was asking that we cut into a huge portion of any profit we might make, use that profit to finish a basement, create a house that now has 4683 heated square feet instead of the current 3052, and make our price per square foot $81!

I know it is difficult to hear the word “profit” bandied about but we have to put food on our tables too.