My wife and I recently decided that we were living under our means, and as patriotic Americans we should really be buried in so much debt that any suggestion of ever paying off all our bills should be met with screams of laughter. This strategy seems to be working for our federal government so far…
We thought about buying a new gas-guzzling SUV, but everyone we know was already doing that.
Then we thought about buying a whole bunch of useless consumer electronics (“But Dear, I need a combo mp3 player/shaver/coffee maker/video recording device!”). But almost none of that is made in America, so we felt remarkably unpatriotic for even considering the idea.
Then we came up with a sure-fire way to buy something 100% American and put ourselves into debt forever: we decided to buy a house. I work right outside New York in one of the “hottest” housing markets in the country. The house buying process here reminds one of a live cow being thrown into a tank of hungry piranha, only much more painful for all the parties involved. Even the cow would agree.
I learned a lot from my house-buying experience and I thought I would pass that advice on to you:
Step 1: Put your existing home up for sale for a ludicrous amount of money. Think of the highest, most wacky value you can imagine and then double it. That’s your asking price. You do this knowing that anyone who puts in a serious bid on your house is shooting heroine on an hourly basis, legally insane, or a professional boxer.
If you receive any offer higher than your asking price, the person is obviously all three.
Note: if you don’t have an existing home for sale, all is not lost! You could always sell any internal organs you aren’t using or, if you’ve already done that, rob a bank. In fact, bank robbing is expected to be one of the fastest growing career fields in the next decade. Start now!
Step 2: “House For Sale” signs give off a special scent which can only be picked up by real estate agents. The moment you put the sign in your window you can expect to see a line of Mercedes slowly driving past your home at all hours of the day and night. Do not be afraid. These are real estate agents trying to have their clients buy your home so they can sell someone else’s.
If a real estate agent doesn’t sell a home at least once a week, he or she usually dies. You’ll recognize the real estate agents because they’ll look like used car salesmen, only they’ll be slightly better looking and wearing marginally less polyester. The people in the back seat of the Mercedes are “potential buyers”. They really aren’t that important.
Step 3: When a real estate agent with clients drives by your house and likes it, he or she will usually then try to see the inside of your house, which means you must keep it clean twenty-four hours a day. This is impossible. So you must always greet the real estate agent and clients with, “Hi, sorry about the mess!”
The potential buyers then walk through your house, holding back giggles and spending exactly ten seconds in each room saying things like “Hmmm…ooo…yeah… well…” to assure you that they are not blind and can see your horribly tragic taste in decorating. If you’re lucky you might have three or four groups of people doing this at once.
Then everyone walks outside to discuss your house and each group of people runs to the hood of a Mercedes to fill out and sign paperwork. This paperwork is called “making an offer” and it means the potential buyers will soon become the buyers! And while this is a good thing for you, the home seller, it is generally considered bad form to yell out, “Holy Christ, you want to pay me HOW MUCH for my shitshack!?!”
Under no circumstances should you directly answer any questions about your house. This is called “lying” and all real estate agents require it of their customers. The slightest bit of honest could ruin a potential home sale.
If someone asks about the freshly dug mounds of dirt in the back yard, just answer, “I don’t know…”
If someone asks about the head-sized hole in the ceiling you just shrug and say, “I never noticed it before…”
If someone asks you about the blood stains on the wall you just shake your head and say, “It was here when I moved in…”
For more examples of real estate lies, look at any house listing in any newspaper.
If you receive more than one offer on your home you can either take the highest offer or you can arrange to have everyone fight to the death in your front yard. You simply need to tell the survivor where he can park the dump truck filled with money.
Step 4: While you are selling your house, you should also be looking at other homes, signing paperwork on the hood of Mercedes and trying to figure out what you can afford (Hint: the answer is always “not much”). My wife and I sold our existing home in about six hours and spent the next three weeks driving past hundreds, and visiting over 50, individual homes in a wild rush reminiscent of that old movie It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
We put in offers on four houses in that time period. Our first offer was rejected because our offer came in twenty minutes after another offer, our second offer was refused because my wife and I weren’t…well, we weren’t gay enough…our third offer was refused because we failed to offer the requisite 155% of the asking price and our forth offer was accepted because the seller was desperate. And the guy used to be a boxer at the local asylum.
Once you find your new house you will only needed to sign about three metric tons of paperwork, pack a lifetime of belongings into little cardboard boxes, call the movers, call seven hundred different utility companies, change our address in about a bazillion places, paint all the walls, fix everything that’s broken in your existing home, move everything to the new house and then do it all again in reverse order.
And once it’s all over you can sit back and relax and spend the next 30 years finding all things the seller lied to you about.
One Response to “How To Buy A House”
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Spilling Coffee with Humorist Tom Coffee » Moving On Up says:
[...] I hear you bought a house and you’re moving again. You think here is much better than there because there are better things here than there were there. Right? [...]
June 28th, 2006 at 9:19 pm