Note this from Free the Drones:
Pretty much everyone knows the standard rule of garage sales and yard sales: whoever goes the earliest gets the best stuff. But they may not be getting the best deals, as Mighty Bargain Hunter discovered. He found that if you go to them at the end of the day, people are desperate to get rid of stuff. They don’t want to keep it, otherwise they wouldn’t have put it out there – so you can offer people a lot less late in the day and they’ll be willing to sell to you.
I’ll give you a better strategy, then show you how to use it to save more than just a few bucks.
First, do go early to the yard sale. Find the stuff you might want to buy. Discuss it with the sellers. Mull. Ponder. Dither. Writhe. Then leave. Then come back late in the day. If your stuff is still there, commit hard but negotiate hard. They already wanted to sell it to you. Use that to your advantage.
Now let’s buy a house instead — using the same strategy.
Show up soon after the house has listed. Arrive when the sellers are home, if they’re still living there, at an open house if not. If you like it and think you might want to buy it, throw off buying signs. You don’t have to lay it on too thick. Just staying in the house and looking at everything is a very strong buying sign. Come back with your spouse if you think you need to give things a boost. Be fun and personable with everyone. Cultivate their good opinion of you.
Mull. Ponder. Dither. Writhe. Then leave.
Now you wait for the dew to evaporate from the rose. Time on market does two things: It sends buyers to other homes and it dispirits the sellers. You want to give them time to entertain this horrifying idea: “What if it never sells?!?”
Make your offer at the best possible time, strategically. When is that? This is me a few months ago:
So what is the absolute strategic best time to write a purchase offer? I think it’s early in the day on the first Tuesday of the month.
We want the first of the month because the seller just wrote another mortgage check and wants to know when the pain is going to stop. We want Tuesday morning because, by then, the seller will know that no offer is coming in from the weekend’s showings. We are catching the sellers at the exact moment their resistance is at its weakest.
Expressed this baldly, this may sound cold — but this is strategy, not passion. You can’t do this at all unless you can abide not getting the home.
But by making the right offer at the right time, you can save yourself thousands of dollars.
Just as at the yard sale, they already wanted to sell it to you. Commit hard but negotiate hard. Win gracefully: You still have repairs to negotiate.
But: The few minutes you spent devising a strategy for buying a home will yield the biggest money you will ever earn…
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