Children.

Seriously.

Who’s idea was this anyways?

I mean, I definitely remember my life before them, and there are a lot of things that I’m missing out on today.

But then, I can’t imagine my life without them, as most of you can attest to as well.

Like most parents, I think my children are the best.   No question about it, they’re cuter, funnier, smarter, and just better than all the other kids out there.  And yes, I have become the person that my favourite comedian, David Cross, complains about.  I tell those “boring stories of banal minutiae” that nobody cares about.

Not, unlike this one…

I drive my daughter to school every morning and along the way, we pass the old Bosley Real Estate office at 290 Merton Street – my home for sixteen years!  My daughter says, “Look, Daddy!  Your old office!”  Every time, without fail.

Knowing now that I’ve moved, my daughter has been bugging me to take her to my new office.

I know, right?  Most kids want to go to an indoor play, or a theme park, but the child of a real estate agent wants to go to “Daddy’s new office.”

Well, on Saturday, she got her wish!

I took the kids to the new office, and although it’s really nothing special, she had a blast.

This little girl can make a good time out of anything, I swear.

While her brother, Duke, sat on the ground like a blob and ate whatever was in my lone unpacked cardboard box, Maya was busy redecorating my entire office with sticky-notes.

We were having a great time until my phone buzzed, and I saw those all caps words that you never want to see:

“URGENT: PRE-EMPTIVE OFFER REGISTERED”

Great.

Here I was, dad-for-a-day, and I was being thrust into action.

The property in question was one that some buyer-clients of mine were interested in, but there was more diligence to be done on the house before we could proceed, and we had planned to go back on Sunday for a second look.  Some houses are true no-brainers, and I would like to think that my clients aren’t the drag-your-feet type.  In fact, very few of my buyers need a second look.  But this house, er, this location had question marks.  With development going on around it, and some questions surrounding properties across the street and down the block, we needed another day or two to investigate.

I know the listing agent for this property very well and she was direct.  She said that the offer was “acceptable,” and that the clients were going to proceed.

In my mind, “acceptable” meant that the offer wasn’t blowing the sellers away, but rather there was something else driving them to accept it.  Maybe they weren’t seeing the level of interest that they had expected.  Or maybe there was something else in the offer that was desirable?

But what else could there be, other than price, right?

Cash is king!

It’s all we care about.

How many blog posts have I written about this?  Where I feign interest in the other negotiable points of the offer?

Well, in this case, it mattered.

My clients, who were up north for the weekend and not able to compete with the pre-emptive offer, passed on the opportunity.  So the listing agent was more candid with me when I told her we weren’t coming in, and she said, “They got a closing date they really liked.”

Closing date?

What?

Since when is this a concern, in lieu of price?

Let’s say that this house would have, could have, should have sold for $1,900,000.

And let’s say that it sold for $1,870,00 with the bully offer.

The sellers have already moved out of the house and can close any time.  They were open to lengthy closing dates, knowing that many buyers desire this, but they would love nothing more than to close in a few weeks.

So now let’s say that the offer they accepted was a 30-day closing, and the offer they might have accepted on offer night, for potentially more money, would have contained a 90-day closing.

The property taxes on this house might run $1,000 per month.

The mortgage, if there is one, might be $3-4K.

Water, electricity, gas, home insurance, alarm monitoring, et al, might run $1,000 per month, max.

So all told, for two months of carrying this house, the sellers might be looking at an additional $10,000?

Why, then, would they be so quick to jump at a “quick closing” if the carrying cost is so modest?

That’s seemingly-rhetorical, only it’s not, in today’s market.

These sellers wanted “peace of mind,” and that was worth something to them – maybe $20,000 or more.

Let’s say they waited until offer night and sold their house with a January closing.  They’d have to maintain the house until then and go through a variable level of anxiety, concern, and wonder, which is different for every seller.  Some sellers don’t care, but others frantically expect the worst possible outcome, like a buyer not closing, even though that almost never happens.

I was surprised to see this house sell for less than it could have, would have, or should have, but then knowing the seller’s situation, and looking back in hindsight, I’m not surprised at all.

A quick closing date got this deal done for a good price on behalf of the buyer.

I’ve been working with buyer-clients to find a Etobicoke home now for about three months, and they only put their finger on the trigger this past September.  Only, once they were ready to pull the trigger, they realized that they weren’t going to get what they wanted for their target price point.

$2,300,000 buys a wonderful home in a multitude of areas, but where we were looking, in and around the Eatonville area, it became apparent that they’d either have to give up 2-3 significant features on their wish list, or look elsewhere.

So we did exactly that: we looked elsewhere.

And once we found ourselves just on the outside border of “The City of Toronto,” where you only pay one land transfer tax, we found a house that had everything on their wish list, and then some.  Not figuratively, but I mean this house was on a wider lot, more square footage, better finishes, and it backed onto a damn park!

The house was listed at $2,450,000 and had been on the market for 30 days.

Most would agree that thirty days is not an eternity, but out this way, it’s what you might call “barely getting started.”

This house had a very interesting history!  It actually sold for $2,350,000 in October of 2019 and was scheduled to close in March of 2020.  But the property was tenanted, and once the COVID pandemic began, the tenants refused to leave.

This is an absolute nightmare scenario for a would-be seller.

This was a two-year-old custom home that was built on spec, and listed for sale unsuccessfully, so then rented out for a year.  Amazingly, somebody bought this house even as it was tenanted (meaning no staging, nice photos, unfettered access, etc), but then the bottom fell out of the damn sale, and the buyer and seller were forced to sign a mutual release – likely some time in May/June, if I had to guess.

The sellers had to go through the proper channels to get the tenants out, and once the house was vacant, they listed it for sale once more.

My clients were in love with the house, and since I picked this one house for them after spending a solid three hours looking over about 45-50 listings one weekend, suffice it to say, I loved it too.

Whether it was the 60-foot lot, or the double-car garage, or the palatial exterior, anybody would love this house.  But how many houses back onto a damn park?  Not having another house behind you is nice, but how about installing a fence with a latch that extends your 120-foot lot by about 9,000 feet?

Because there is no land transfer tax in Mississauga, the buyers would be saving about $44,000.  They set their new max at $2,350,000 for a house out this way, and told me that they would have no problem going to this price, for this house.

I told my clients, “We’re getting this for $2,300,000,” and they were enthused.  They wondered what the plan was, and doubted whether or not we could get the seller to accept $50,000 less than he had sold the house for, one year ago, in a market that’s up 9%, but I laid it all out for them.

“We have to get the sellers to focus on more than just the money,” I told them.

“Look at the history of this property.  Get in the minds of the sellers.”

The listing itself wasn’t all that great.  No staging, no virtual tour, no marketing of any substance, no pre-home inspection, and the agent was from way, way up there.  Nowhere near Mississauga or Toronto.  It just felt like an opportunity to me.

“We’re going to make them an offer they can’t refuse,” I said, completely aware of the over-used Godfathther quote.

“We’ll go in at $2,300,000, unconditional, with a 30-day closing, and a whopping $230,000 deposit to accompany the offer.”

Every negotiable point therein was sure to get a reaction from the sellers.

These sellers had been hanging on to this house for two years now, and they didn’t want to lease the house.  They did so because they couldn’t sell it two years ago.

Once they did sell the house last fall, it was conditionally sold for ten business days.

Once the deal was firm, they had a deposit, which I would guess was less than 5% (that’s how it’s done out there), and that money was held in trust until closing.

When the scheduled closing date passed, and the tenant refused to leave, those funds were held in limbo; but what was, say, $75,000, in the context of a $2,350,000 house?

All told, this was lining up for a “once bitten, twice shy” scenario for this seller, so we went out of our way to make our offer exceptionally attractive.

We made an unconditional offer.  The seller didn’t have to wait ten business days like last time to find out if the deal would go firm.

We offered a 30-day closing, rather than the 120-day closing that was agreed upon last year.

Our $230,000 deposit was likely triple what they had received last time, and we obtained a bank draft and sent a high-resolution photo of the cheque with our offer.

And, yes, the $2,300,000 offer price was well below the $2,450,000 list price, and $50K less than they had sold for one year ago, but that was exactly the point.

I had been greasing the wheels with the listing agent for two weeks now, telling him that we were considering six different houses in Mississauga, and remarking constantly that “everything seems to be for sale.”

I let him think that he pestered me into bringing an offer, even though we had planned to do so all along.  We did a home inspection one weekend which the listing agent might have thought was merely a second showing, who knows.  But you either click “buyer broker showing” or “inspection,” so all he had to do was look!

Right from the get-go, I told him that we were firm with our offer.

I used my favourite line: “I’ve done the negotiating here.”  This infers that I negotiated with my clients to get them up to this price, or on paper for this deal, etc.

With a firm offer and a 30-day closing date, plus a massive deposit, this was a “no-brainer,” as I explained to the other agent.

He tried his best, to his credit.

He showed me their month-old appraisal from the bank at $2,400,000, but I told him that we weren’t going up in price.

He talked endlessly about comparable sales, replacement cost, appreciation from last year when they sold for $2,350,000, but I told him we weren’t going up in price.

He gave me a “verbal” sign-back at $2,350,000, which was a number my clients were willing to go to, but without signing the offer back on paper, this told me that the sellers didn’t want to negate our original offer.  And thus, I told him yet again that we weren’t going up in price.

In the end, the sellers accepted.

$2,300,000 for that house, in my somewhat-unbiased, professional opinion, is an absolute steal.

And had we made our offer for $2,300,000 with a condition on inspection and/or financing for five business days, with a 90-day closing, and a $100,000 deposit within 48 hours, there’s no way in hell the sellers would have accepted.

Sometimes, it’s not only about the money.

Maybe it’s rare, and maybe it’s wishful thinking on the part of naive first-time buyers more often than not, but here was a case of a seller almost willing to make the price secondary to ensuring their two-year nightmare was over.

A friend of mine was negotiating a sale last week and the listing agent said, “These people don’t need to sell.  If they don’t get their price, they’ll just stay.”  Only, my friend had done her homework, and looked up the sellers through social media and other mediums.  Low and behold, they had a photo of them standing in front of their new house and the “SOLD” sign, with their kids.  Looks to me like somebody that needs to sell, by a particular date that they had detailed in the social media post.

Information is readily available at our fingertips.  Do some research and outside the box thinking, talk to the listing agent, figure out what else there could be to use to your advantage, other than the price.

And now, for your listening pleasure, I give you David Cross’ routine on children.  This is NSFW, and is also from a time when comedy was allowed to be offside…