House Negotiation

REAL WORLD NEGOTIATION

Overview

Provide a brief overview of the key events.

Last year, my wife graduated from McCombs with her MBA and went to work for Dr Pepper Snapple Group as a brand manager. She was very happy to get the opportunity to work for Dr Pepper, but unfortunately that meant that we would have to be long distance while I finished my second year here at McCombs. To save a little money this year while we were living apart, my wife chose a small apartment to live in. Now that I am graduating and am headed to Dallas myself, we need a larger place to live. I have a house full of furniture in Austin that I need to move and will not fit in her small 600 square foot apartment.

Last month, we started to look for houses that we could move into when I graduated. For the first couple of weeks we had absolutely no luck. We couldn’t find a lot of options that met our needs and when we did find viable options, they got scooped up before we had a chance to see them. Literally, one Saturday we had seven properties on our list that our realtor was going to take us to see. By the time we met up just after lunch at the first property, all seven had been rented. Needless to say, good properties were not staying on the market very long. For the first time in my experience, we had to negotiate the rent with the property owner, offering to pay more than the asking price to ensure the opportunity to lease his property. In my past experience renting houses and apartments I have been able to negotiate the price down. Now that situation has flipped because of the high level of demand in the market right now.

The house that I used for this negotiation was located on Park lane, a location that was not perfect but was close to our ideal area. From the pictures and description posted online, the house seemed to have everything we were looking for and at a very reasonable price. It came on the market on a Wednesday morning. We immediately contacted the realtor to...