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Where Fantasy Meets Reality
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Still no deal.
"If you're not willing to take the asking price, then you shouldn't have dropped it that low," Caine said. "I felt like I was being jerked around."
She checked on the house later and found the seller had raised the asking price. The house has since gone off the market, and Caine has become so worried about the state of the economy that she is no longer looking to move.
Kathryn Higgins, a New York real estate agent who has a master's degree in psychology, said sellers who insist on higher prices for their homes generally take a month to shed the rose-colored glasses. They start wondering why more people haven't stopped by their open houses and why the home is still sitting on the market. That's when Higgins sits them down for a reality check.
"They tend to live in the past, not in the moment," she said. "You can talk until you're blue in the face. . . . They filter the information, and you have to also be able to confront that."
But sellers are not the only ones with outsize expectations. Higgins said buyers have become self-righteous during these economic doldrums. Those who have the cash for down payments and are preapproved for loans feel that they are "part of a privileged class," she said. She cautioned buyers against becoming too demanding.
"Just because you have the money and you have the mortgage, the seller's not going to give it away," Higgins said. "For the same reason you want to live in it, it's worth something."
The first time that Dan Schick made an offer on a home a few months ago, he tried to lowball. He lived in Baltimore and wanted to move to the District with his girlfriend. All the news of turmoil in the financial and housing markets led him to believe he could score a deal.
He found a house on Capitol Hill that was originally listed at $900,000 but had dropped to $850,000 over four months. He offered 15 percent less than the asking price. The seller's agent laughed.
"In all honesty, your client's offer was a joke," the agent wrote in an e-mail. The home had fetched another offer. Clearly, Schick had not won.
"That at least quickly taught us that the D.C. market was not so bad that people would be selling their homes for much less than what they were asking," Schick said.
Sometimes, buyers can become so intent on getting a deal that they lose sight of the true goal: finding a home.
