Negotiating a Price for a House

Buying a house, as I mentioned in a previous post, can be extremely stressful.  Once you get deeper into the process, things become more complicated.  One thing that I think could be easier is the part where the buyers and the sellers negotiate the selling price of the house.

Our buying agent told us that houses usually sell for 97-98% of their asking price.  His aim was to do better than that.  We had a price point that we could not go over.  And obviously, the sellers had a price point that they would not go under.

So negotiations begin with us making an offer that is far below anything we know would be accepted.  As buyers, we do this knowing that they will hopefully come down a bit in price, then we will come up, then they will come down, etc.  Eventually, we will meet in the middle and all will be good in the world.  This is just ideally what will happen, but it is not always the case.

In our situation, it is obvious that our top price possibility was the sellers lowest price that they would accept for their house.  So after much back and forth, which only took 2 days since we were all pretty committed to making this sale happen, we finally came to that middle number that we could all accept.

My question is, why couldn't we just skip the in-between stages.  Obviously, they had a number in mind and so did we.  The bidding was just a waste of time.  I know that people want to get the most for their house.  But if a couple bids low on a house, then they are obviously not willing to pay the full asking price.  It would be easier to just sit down and work it out if that is possible, especially if there has not been any other offers for the house and the sellers are paying 2 mortgages because they have already moved.

After all is said and done, we will end up paying about 96% of the original asking price for the house.  So our buying agent got exactly what he wanted and did his job well.  We are happy and now we just have to worry about the inspections going well.  And if everything works out, we will be moving our family into our very first home within the next few months.  It is crazy and exciting!!  :-)  Yay!!