Have I told you about the time that another buyer appeared out of nowhere at 11:30 pm to scoop my client? It was about 1993 and multiple offers were non-existent because it was a buyers’ market, if you can believe it. My client had been looking for a bungalow for several months. We finally found one he liked so we prepared an offer. I met with the seller and her agent at about 7 pm to present my client’s offer and begin the negotiations. After going back and forth several times, the seller eventually decided to accept my client’s final offer. What happened next is still as clear in my mind as if it happened yesterday.

It was 11:30 pm.  The seller had her pen in her hand. Her agent pointed to the place on the offer where she needed to initial to complete the deal. She reached out and, just as pen approached paper, his  pager went off. (For those of you not familiar with pagers, imagine a device the size of a flip phone that could only be used to receive text messages.) He looked at the name on his  pager, reached for his client’s hand and said “Don’t sign that. I need to make a call.” He excused himself from the room to make his call (because the phone was in another room and almost no one had a cell phone back then – I had one, but it was the size and weight of a brick) and then, following a short, whispered conversation with his client, told me “My client won’t be accepting your client’s offer unless he’s willing to pay more. There’s another agent outside with a better offer.” My client wasn’t willing to pay more and he and I both had a hard time believing that another buyer had miraculously appeared out of thin air at 11:30 pm. That just didn’t happen back then! But it turned out to be true and that other buyer bought my client’s bungalow.

Hindsight, as they say, is 20-20, but had my client not negotiated so hard and not gone back and forth so many times in the process, he might have had a firm deal in place before 11:30 pm and it would have been the other buyer who was out of luck. But that was not to be.

This episode taught me a very valuable lesson which I was grateful to learn so early in my career because I’ve applied it many times since then. Residential real estate exists in its own strange world (hence the psychedelic spiral photo). Human emotions and personalities are involved so anything and everything can and will happen. Whenever you have an offer in front of you, you should seriously consider whether or not you’d like to accept it because every time you sign it back, you run the risk that the buyer will walk away, never to be heard from again, or that another buyer will swoop in at the last minute and buy YOUR dream home. And to add insult to injury, it may be months before another buyer likes your home enough to make you an offer (if you’re selling) or before you find a home you like enough to buy (if you’re buying). Yes, you want to negotiate the best deal possible (and no one likes to negotiate more than me), but never forget that Pigs Get Fat and Hogs Get Slaughtered.

And if you’re wondering where the title to this post came from, there’s a story behind that, too. When I was a teenager, my best friend’s father was known to be a bit of a shopper. He was a marathoner so most of his shopping consisted of running gear. I remember him having upwards of twenty pairs of the original Nike Waffle Trainers (blue with a yellow swoosh, if that rings a bell) in his closet. We used to kid him about his running shoe fetish and, one day, asked him how he decided whether to buy something or not. He answered “You see it, you like it, you buy it because you may never see it again.” (We added our own caveat to his saying – ” If you can afford it”.) This holds true for real estate, too. Don’t pass up an opportunity to accept an offer until you’ve thought long and hard about the possibility of losing the deal entirely and decided that you’re willing to live with that result.