Homes And Other Black Holes
Page 8
This is a very difficult question, but top real estate experts from all over the world agree that you should ask $127,500 and ultimately settle for $119,250. Also you should throw in the outdoor gas barbecue system with the charcoal-roasted spiders permanently bonded to the grill.
Getting Your House Ready To Show
Once you’re signed up with a broker and have decided on an asking price, you need to fix your house up so it looks as though clean and tasteful grownups live there, instead of yourselves. Take
a hard look at your house and furnishings, and ask yourself how they’ll appear to prospective buyers. Chances are that with a minimum of time and effort, you can make a number of dramatically superficial improvements. For example, suppose you have an ugly old sofa in the living room with a leg missing from one corner, which you’ve propped up with a copy of The Sex Lusters, by Harold Robbins. You’ll make a far better impression with an acknowledged classic such as Moby Dick, by Jackie Collins. You can also make a big improvement in the appearance of dirty, crayon-marked walls by buying a can of flat white latex paint and using it to stand on while you install a lower-wattage light bulb. And of course it’s always a smart idea to nail all your bathroom doors shut.
The overall effect you’re trying to create with these “homey” little touches is that YOUR HOUSE is a warm, welcoming, and—ABOVE ALL—real kind of place, similar to the set of a 1962 situation comedy. You might want to create the impression that, at any moment, Ricky Ricardo might come bursting through the front door and get a great big welcome-home kiss from Mary Tyler Moore.
But the most important ingredient in the home-selling equation is you, the homeowner, because only you have a really intimate, detailed knowledge of the house; only you, who have lived there, know all the interesting little idiosyncrasies it has—all the special features and hidden “secrets” that make you want to DUMP it like a grocery bag full of armpit hair. Your job is to help your broker make sure that prospective buyers view these things in the proper light.
Unfortunately, brokers don’t always appreciate receiving help from sellers. In fact, most brokers won’t even want you hanging around when they show the house. They’ll let you know this by dropping little hints such as: “Please don’t hang around while I show the house,” and: “If you hang around while I show the house, I will kill you.” The broker is concerned that if you are always hovering in the background like some kind of desperate street person, the prospective buyers won’t feel free to speak their minds.
There is some basis for the broker’s concern. The last time we sold a house, whenever I was in the room, the prospective buyers would always describe everything as “interesting.”
“Hmmmm,” they say, looking at one of my Home Improvement Projects. “How interesting!” Meaning: “I can’t wait to tell the people in my office about this.”
So on the one hand, you don’t want to make the buyers feel uncomfortable, but on the other hand, you want to be available to explain features of the home that the broker might not be familiar with. The solution to this dilemma is to hide in closets when prospective buyers come around. By ducking from room to room just ahead of them, you’ll be invisible, yet still available in case a question comes up that the broker can’t answer.
PROSPECTIVE BUYERS: What is this greenish slime dripping from the ceiling everywhere and eating holes in the floor?
BROKER: Well, it’s, umm, errr, it’s, ah ...
VOICE FROM CLOSET: It’s nothing to worry about!
PROSPECTIVE BUYERS (vastly relieved): Whew! Because for a moment there, we were concerned.
One major problem you’ll have to be on the alert for is when prospective buyers get really interested in your house and start to bring around ...
Horrible Relatives
Virtually all prospective buyers have horrible relatives with names like Uncle Roger who believe themselves to be experts in the field of home construction on the basis of their vast experience as thirty-year subscribers to Popular Mechanics. The prospective buyers will bring Uncle Roger around, and unless he is stopped, he will go into a testosterone-induced nitpicking frenzy wherein he finds hundreds of thousands of things wrong with your house. This is why it’s always a good idea, when you’re darting from closet to closet, to carry a garrote:
REAL ESTATE BROKER: And this is the master bedroom.
UNCLE ROGER: Well, this here is no good. These windows are only double-glazed. You want triple-glazed, plus you don’t want this kind of hinge. Plus you want more electrical outlets than this. Plus you want AAAAACCCCCCCCCKKKKKK!
REAL ESTATE BROKER: What on earth was that?
PROSPECTIVE BUYERS: Somebody just jumped out of that closet over there and garroted Uncle Roger.
AUNT LOUISE: Good.
Sooner or later, if you continue to engage in savvy sales techniques such as these, a buyer will become interested enough to make an offer on your house. The important thing, during these negotiations, is to First remain calm. Do not become emotionally involved. Remember that even though you and the buyers are on
“opposite sides of the fence,” the odds are that they are just regular everyday human beings like yourself, the only difference being that they’re trying to screw you out of all your worldly goods. So while on the one hand you want to be reasonable, in the sense of frowning thoughtfully at the buyers’ opening offer, you also want to be firm, in the sense of hurling it disdainfully to the floor and inviting friends and neighbors to help you spit on it.
Price is not the key issue in these negotiations. As I noted in an earlier chapter, the price you will ultimately settle on is the same one everybody always settles on, namely about five percent less than what you originally asked. Both sides know this, deep in their souls, but nobody really wants to just come out and admit it, for fear of appearing to be a wimp. So what you’ll do—everybody does this—is get into serious, heavy-duty negotiations over which side gets to keep various home accessories such as:
Ugly light fixtures Dingy draperies, and above all Minor grease-encrusted kitchen appliances that nobody really wants
These are the areas in which you want to be as petty as is humanly possible, in an effort to establish that you are a Tough Customer Who Will Not Be Taken Advantage Of. You want to stride in a forceful manner around your family room, cigar in hand, shouting instructions to your broker, such as:
“All right, they can have the Veg-O-Matic, but the sons of bitches are not gonna get the optional grape-peeling attachment!”
And:
“They want the ice cube trays?! Over MY DEAD BODY!!”
Using this aggressive approach, you should be able to retain possession of many of your prized home accessories, which will fetch you a handsome $1.85 when you hold your garage sale.
How You Will Feel After You Finally Sign The Agreement Of Sale
You’ll experience a feeling of almost unbelievable elation, even better than the way you felt the time Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s vault on national TV and it was empty. This feeling will last for as long as seven tenths of a second, at which point you’ll remember the clause in the sale agreement, put there by some writhing little insect of a lawyer, that states:
The SELLER agrees that if, at ANY TIME prior to the actual sale of the house, SOMETHING BAD happens, like for example let’s say that on THE VERY MORNING OF THE SETTLEMENT, through NO FAULT OF THE SELLER, a TREE ROOT that for 127 years has been totally benign, suddenly, as if guided by DESTINY, decides to block the MAIN MUNICIPAL WASTEWATER LINE in front of the seller’s house, causing a veritable VOLCANO OF RAW SEWAGE to erupt right in the SELLER’S GUEST BATHROOM and quickly flow “THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE HOUSE” while the SELLER is out at the SUPERMARKET picking up a bottle of WINDEX so as to put the last few finishing touches on the HOUSE so that it will be neat as a PIN for the NEW OWNERS, then HA HA the SELLER has to give the BUYER all his DEPOSIT MONEY back and the SELLER can kiss the whole deal GOOD-BYE.
So for the two months, or whatever
, between the time you sign the contract and the time you actually close the deal, you’ll experience a condition that famed psychologist Sigmund Freud identified as Agreement of Sale Paranoia. You’ll be afraid to use the heating or air-conditioning systems; afraid to use the water faucets, turn on lights, or close doors firmly; afraid even to speak too loudly, for fear that you might set off some kind of sympathetic vibration that will cause the whole house to fall down. In short, you will become a crazy person. “YOU FOOL!” you’ll shriek, leaping out from behind your hedge and tackling the UPS man just as he’s about to ring your doorbell. “Are you trying to KILL US ALL?”
This is a natural reaction, but the truth is, you probably have nothing to worry about. The odds are that nothing bad will happen, and when you finally get to the Ritual Closing Ceremony, when you realize that the whole thing is going to work out after all, you’ll experience a feeling of relief, a feeling that will grow stronger and stronger until, moments before the sale is legally finalized, you are knocked to the floor by the shock wave from the gas main exploding directly under your house.
But you’re not going to let a little thing like the total destruction of your house, seconds before you were about to sell it, get you down. No, you are made of sterner Stuff than that: you are a Homeowner. You’re not a particularly bright one, given the fact that You bought this book, but nevertheless you are going to pick up the pieces of your life, as soon as they come down out of the sky, and get on with your life. Because you know that you’ll have plenty more homes to own before you finally shuffle off what we in the real estate profession call “this mortal coil” and go up to that Great Subdivision in the Sky. I’m willing to bet there will be nothing in your price range.
Index
B
Bakker, Tammy Faye, 135
Bang, Big, 70
Big Stu’s Discount House of Taste, 90
Boone, Pat, 51
Brando, Marion, 29
Brite, Rainbow, 64
Bunny, Billy the, 69
C
Capone, Al, 142
Center, Epcot, 30
Cher, 109
Coffee, Mr., 42
Consumer Money Geeks, 35
Crockett, Davy, 125
D
Dallas, Debbie Does, 112
Death Penis, 84
Dick, Moby, 137
E
Earl’s All-Night Nude Review & Motorcycle Repair, 7
Eggs, Cute Little Baby, 26
Elizabeth, Queen, 109
Evening Gown Competition, 12
F
Fairy, Car, 7
G
Godzilla, 122
Gulp, Big, 111
H
Hancock, John, 39
Helpful Seller, shooting of, 138
L
Lassie, 108
Lawns in space, 121
libya, 23
M
Mary, Virgin, 18
McMahon, Ed, 3
Midnight Dance of the Bozo Father, 103
Muffler, Mister, 32
P
Packing People, 44
Pediatricians Backwards “R” Us, 67-68
Perkins, Tony, 52
R
Ranger, Lone, 67
Retrievers, Labrador, as strategic weapons, 65-67
Reynolds, Burt, and giant centipede, 71
Rivera, Geraldo, 142
Robbins, Harold, 136
S
Sashweight, Wilmington A. “Bill” IV, 90
Savage, Wayne, 28
Slime, 103, 109
Spark Plug, 126
T
Tokyo, destruction of by mutant insect, 99
Two-Shoes, Goody, 124
U
Uncle Roger, garroting of, 139
V
Vermin, Surplus, 104
Z
Zoo-Roni, 91
About The Author
Dave Barry is a staff writer for the Miami Herald, where he writes about such topics as politics, world affairs, and giant mutant crickets attacking villages in Peru. His weekly humor column appears in more than 120 newspapers, and his writing has appeared in a number of national magazines. In 1986 he won the American Association of Newspaper Editors’ Distinguished Writing Award for commentary. In 1988 he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, an event that confirmed the widely held view that western civilization is headed down the toilet.
Barry lives with his wife, Beth, and son, Robby, in Coral Gables, Florida, in a house that is slowly getting worse.
About The Illustritor
“Shoe and Skyler" creator Jeff MacNelly has won three Pulitzer Prizes for his political cartooning with The Richmond News Leader and The Chicago Tribune, and has twice won the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben. He was never in the Marine Corps, but did work for Camp Monadnock in New Hampshire, where he learned that summer camp is a lot more fun if you’re a counselor. His cartoon strip “Shoe” is syndicated in over nine-hundred newspapers. Jeff, his wife Scottie, and his three sons live in Virginia, where he enjoys painting, sculpting, and building stuff.
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