by Dave Barry
One important warning before you get started: You want to be on the alert for the Helpful Seller. This is the kind of seller who, the instant you enter his home, leaps out and attaches himself to you, like an intestinal parasite, only worse, because intestinal parasites, for all their flaws, do not feel a great need to point out every single one of their home’s numerous features, whereas the Helpful Seller does.
“This is the hall bathroom,” he’ll say, showing you a bathroom in a hall. Then he’ll watch you very closely, trying to gauge your reaction to this bathroom, and you’ll feel obligated to compliment him on it.
“Very nice!” you’ll say.
“This toilet seat was installed quite recently,” he’ll say.
“Huh!” you’ll say.
“It’s padded,” he’ll say.
“Bang,” you’ll say, shooting him in the forehead with your small-caliber revolver. This is why many real estate brokers these days use tranquilizer darts to subdue hyperactive sellers right in the foyer, before they have a chance to become too Helpful.
HOW MANY HOUSES SHOULD YOU LOOK AT?
Most experts recommend that, for maximum effectiveness, you should look at forty-five or even fifty houses per day. Experienced home shoppers often reach the point where they can leap out of the real estate broker’s car, look at a house, and get back into the car before it reaches a complete stop.
If you follow this procedure, by nightfall your brain will be tightly packed with hundreds of thousands of bits of important real estate information, and you and your spouse will be able to have useful decision-making conversations like this:
YOU: I kind of liked that contemporary with the fireplace in the kitchen.
YOUR SPOUSE: No, the contemporary had fire damage in the kitchen. You’re thinking of the split-level, the one where the garage floor had a Rust-Oleum stain shaped like the Virgin Mary.
YOU: No, that was the colonial, remember? With big white pillars out front and no toilets?
YOUR SPOUSE: No, you’re thinking of Monticello. Remember? We went there on vacation in 1979?
YOU: No, it was 1978.
Using this logical elimination process, you’ll begin to narrow your list down to the three or four dozen houses that you are truly interested in. These are the ones you should go back and inspect in a thorough manner, using this convenient checklist:
HOME INSPECTION CHECKLIST
The Roof
This is a “must.” There is an old German expression that goes: “A house without a roof is like a machterstrassefurtermorgennachtdankeschoen without a gutsprechenbuchlungwiegehtvolkswagenporsche.” If anything, this is an understatement. So the first thing you should do is go up and crouch in the attic and see if you get bit by a bat. This is usually an indication that the house contains bats, which, depending on your lifestyle, could be a negative factor, especially if one tries to suck out your blood, because that means it’s a vampire bat, which means the house is located in South America, so right away we are talking about probably a fairly long commute to work.
Also while you’re up there you should look around and see if you notice any of the following important house parts:
You will recognize these objects instantly, because most of them are pieces of wood. Make a note of them.
The Floors
These should be sturdy and level. The only proven way to check for sturdiness is to drop a men’s standard sixteen-pound bowling ball (Always carry one with you!) onto the floor from a height of seventy-five feet through a hole drilled in the roof, then carefully note the results. (No, the seller will not object, unless he has “something to hide.”)
To check for levelness, you will need a standard piece of string and a standard rock. Using a standard knot, tie one end of the string, then, holding the other end of the string, stand in the middle of a room, and carefully note which way the rock points. Ideally, it will point toward the floor. If it points somewhere else, such as toward a wall, this is often an indication of nonlevelness (SEE DIAGRAM).
The Plumbing
Forget about the plumbing. It will work perfectly. It always does, when you inspect it, because plumbing is one of the most intelligent life forms on the planet, and it would never be so foolish as to tip its hand to you. It will wait until after you have bought the house. Then it will make its move. Late some night, you’ll hear strange gurglings and sloshings in your pipes; this will be the sound of your toilets communicating with each other, making their plans:
FIRST TOILET: It’s on. Tomorrow is New Year’s Day, they have house guests, it’s four degrees below zero outside, and their plumber is in Switzerland. We break tonight.
SECOND TOILET: Ha ha! I’ll tell the hot water heater.
The Electrical System
The most important thing to find out about the electrical system is whether it contains enough “volts,” which are little tiny pieces of energy shaped like arrows so you can tell which direction they’re moving in science class diagrams, as shown on.
The standard measurement for volts is “amps,” also called “watts,” which travel around in what is called a “circuit.” A typical circuit works as follows:
At the electrical company, fuel oil is burned to set fire to a generator, which gives off electrical energy in the form of sparks, which are put into wires and sent to your home, where the electricity waits in the wall until you turn on your toaster, at which point it rushes through the wire and into the English muffin, and from there into your stomach, where it remains until a cool, dry day when you are walking down a hall scuffing your feet on a carpet and you go to open a door, causing the electricity to leap into the doorknob, where it remains forever, building up over time to tremendously high levels, which is why scientists are now concerned that if some unscrupulous entity such as Libya or God forbid an adolescent male ever figures how to release the power, he could, using only the latent doorknob energy contained in a single older ranch-style home, vaporize Oregon.
But your immediate concern, as a potential buyer, is making sure that the house has the right number of volts. Following is a chart depicting the most popular voltages currently available in the housing market:
POPULAR HOME VOLTAGES
120
220
9*
Which voltage is right for you? This, more than anything else, is a matter of personal taste; and like most matters of personal taste, it is best left in the hands of a qualified interior designer.
Heating and Cooling
Heating and cooling should be supplied by one or more large filthy objects squatting in a basement or closet. You should inspect these objects from a safe distance; you should also find out what the total annual heating and cooling costs will be, using the following formula:
Ask the person selling the house how much the total annual heating and cooling cost will be.
To determine the actual cost, multiply the amount this person gives you by the weight, in pounds, of the devices supplying the heating and cooling.
Insects
Make no mistake about it: there will be insects in the house. The entire planet is teeming with insect life; scientists now estimate that there are over 60,000,000,000,000,000,000 different species living under my kitchen sink alone.
Fortunately, most insects pose no threat to homeowners. All they want is to eat your food and have babies in your sock drawer and maybe crawl up your nostril while you’re sleeping. In exchange for this, many of them gladly perform useful household services, such as pooping on your toothbrush. “You scratch my back, and I’ll suck blood out of yours”—that is the insect motto.
The exception, of course, is termites, which are small socialist insects that eat houses. (We don’t know what they ate before houses were invented. We think maybe garages.) Termites live in large colonies ruled by a lady termite with an enormous butt, called the Queen, who governs over a strict termite hierarchy consisting of: the Biters, the Chewers, the Spit Makers, the Soldiers, the House of Commons
, the Nannies, and the Cute Little Baby Eggs. Each of these colony members has specific duties and responsibilities that are clearly posted on the Bulletin Board, although of course, being insects, they are much too stupid to remember what these duties and responsibilities are, so they basically just scurry around at random. Nevertheless, as I noted earlier, they can eat your prospective house, so it is very important that you inspect carefully for the Two Telltale Signs of Termite Infestation, which are:
Termites walking around with pieces of your prospective house in their mouths
No sign whatsoever of termites, because they are hiding
If all the items on this checklist check out to your satisfaction, it’s time to make the standard Insulting Opening Offer on the house, which we’ll cover in our next chapter.
* Requires 9 volt battery (not included)
3
How to Get
Very Deeply into Debt
If you want to come out a winner in the negotiations for your new house, you have to be tough. “This is not a time for human decency,” are the words of Wayne Savage, the internationally renowned lecturer and author of the best-selling book on negotiating strategy, Leave Them Bleeding in the Dirt, which retails for $178.63 and not a penny less. Which is why you need to know:
HOW TO NEGOTIATE LIKE A REAL SLIMEBALL
A fine example of the kind of negotiating approach you should take can be found in the excellent corporate training film The Godfather, where, as part of his negotiations with a movie producer, Marlon Brando gains a subtle psychological advantage by arranging to have the producer wake up in bed next to the head of a deceased horse. (It could have been worse; it could have been Marlon Brando.)
This is not to suggest that to get a good price on a house, you need to go around decapitating domesticated animals. No indeed; wild animals are more than adequate for most residential transactions. But the point is, you have to be firm.
At the outset of your negotiations, it is very important to create the impression that you don’t really want to buy the house at all, that in fact you hate the house, and the mere thought of it makes you physically ill. Your opening offer should convey this. It should be worded as follows: “We don’t want your house, so we will give you X number of dollars for it, including all major appliances and the children.” (Note that you should not name a specific amount. You should actually use the term “X number of dollars,” so as to avoid tipping your hand.) The broker will take your offer to the seller, who at this point has a number of options, such as:
He can accept your offer.
He can reject your offer.
He can give back the dinette set, the pool table, AND the Epcot Center vacation in exchange for whatever is behind curtain number two.
Another possibility is that he will make a counteroffer, which your broker will bring back for you to consider. “We don’t want to sell the house,” it might say. “We only put it on the market because we enjoy having total strangers come around and test-flush all our toilets. But we are willing to let it go for Y number of dollars, plus you can have little Deirdre, provided you raise her in a religious environment. We get the microwave.”
And then you send the broker back with another offer, and they send you another counteroffer, and so on until the broker, his fingers bloodied from typing up the various negotiating positions, drops dead in the street from exhaustion, which is the signal for the buyer and the seller to settle on a price equal to the original asking price minus about five percent. This is the price that everybody always winds up at, and if we all just agreed on it at the beginning, there would be a lot less hassle and inconvenience in the form of dead brokers. But we have to ask ourselves if this would really be such a desirable outcome.
In any event, now that you and the seller have set a price, you need to sign the agreement of sale, which should be worded in standard legal terminology, as follows:
Standard Agreement of Sale
WHEREAS the Seller wants to sell, and the Buyer wants to buy, and they think they got a price that’s not too low or too high; and the Buyer gave the Seller a down payment to hold, now he’ll try to get a mortgage ’fore they BOTH grow old; and the Seller’s gonna see if he got termites in his place ’cause if he does, the Buyer’s gonna tear it right up in his face; but if everything is cool and nobody’s late, then the deal will go down on the Settlement Date.
CHORUS
Oooh baby baby
We gon’ have a transaction tonight
Of course I realize you probably don’t understand some of this “legal jargon,” but this is only because you are stupid. This is why it’s important to ask several lawyers to give you contradictory advice before you sign anything, including get-well cards.
Meanwhile, however, it is time to go around to some banks and see if you can find one foolish enough to lend you some money.
ARE YOU FINANCIALLY FIT?
The first thing you need to do is perform a detailed financial analysis of how much money you have versus how much you’re going to need to buy your house. The way you do this is you draw up what professional accountants call a “Balance Sheet,” which should look like this:
Money You Have
Savings account: $927.62
Checking account: Conceivably as much as $83.15, provided that the check you wrote to Mister Muffler has not been cashed yet
Other assets, primarily canned goods and undeveloped photographs of the airplane wing taken during your trip to Disney World: $44.02
Money You Need to Buy a House
Cost to pay random lawyers for God knows what (see “The Ritual Closing Ceremony”): $6,765.90
Cost to have various inspectors come around and hold clipboards and shine flashlights at things but fail to notice any sign that the heating system is going to explode moments after you take possession of your new home: $1,250
Taxes: $3,856.90
Additional taxes that nobody ever mentioned to you: $4,847.89
Taxes that are just now being rushed into law and will apply only to your specific house purchase: $5,563.92
“Points,” which is technically defined as “money that for some reason you have to give the bank, even though you are the one trying to buy the goddamn house, and no matter how many times you ask, you will never be given an intelligible explanation for this”: $8,745.00
Other (phone deposit, cost of actual house, etc.): $126,436.06
Now, using these figures, we can create the following graphic representation to compare the amount of money you have with the amount you need:
So we can see from this financial analysis that you are definitely going to need the bank to give you a lot of money in the form of a mortgage. The bank is willing to do this because, the way mortgages are set up, no matter how many payments you make, you still owe the bank all the money you ever borrowed. Really. This explains why, in all your wide circle of friends, you don’t know a single person who ever came close to paying off a mortgage. When you have a mortgage, at the end of every year the bank sends you a statement like this:
YOUR OUTSTANDING BALANCE AS OF THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR: $93,423.54
YOUR TOTAL PAYMENTS MADE DURING THE YEAR: $11,647.32
YOUR OUTSTANDING BALANCE AS OF THE END OF THE YEAR: $93,423.54
It may seem as though the banks are taking unfair advantage of consumers here, but they really have no choice. A few years back, they lent billions and billions of dollars to the Third World, which had promised to spend the money on factories and heavy machinery, but which in fact lost it gambling on rooster fights. And since the banks can’t very well march down to the Southern Hemisphere and repossess, for example, Brazil, you can understand why they have no choice but to get the money from average everyday unarmed consumers such as yourself.
All mortgages work basically the same way: You sign a bunch of papers, then you make large monthly payments until the Second Coming. Nevertheless, the top Consumer Money Geeks all recommend that you “shop around” f
or your mortgage, because there are a number of different kinds available, each with its own terms, conditions, feeding habits, and so forth. Some of the more popular ones are:
The Fixed-Rate Mortgage
The Variable-Rate Mortgage
The Mortgage Whose Rate Is Based on What Order the Teams Finish in the National League East
The Mortgage with a Real Low Rate That Is Advertised in Huge Print in the Newspaper But Nobody Ever Actually Gets It
The Balloon Mortgage
The Party Hat Mortgage
The Mortgage That Is Really the Expired Warranty for a 1966 Sears Washing Machine
The Mortgage of the Living Dead
Here’s an important piece of advice to bear in mind when you’re shopping around for your mortgage: Don’t be intimidated. Sure, the bank is a great big, rich, powerful financial institution and you are a small, worthless piece of scum. But that doesn’t mean you should walk into the bank with your hat in your hand, like some kind of beggar! Not at all! You should crawl into the bank!
Ha ha! Just kidding, of course. You have nothing to worry about. All the bank will ask you to do is supply the home phone number of everybody you have ever known, even casually, since the fourth grade. Then you’ll have an interview with a Loan Officer, who’ll ask you a few standard screening questions, such as: “To get this mortgage, are you willing to lick the gum wads off my shoe bottoms?”
