Last spring at a townhouse showing in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the agent David Harris watched his client, a married millennial with a kid, bounce from room to room before taking a seat on a staged sofa — a gesture Harris had come to regard as a cue that a client feels at home and is about to make an offer.
He was right. His client liked the place. Harris suggested they go $50,000 over asking, or $1.7 million; he anticipated a bidding war. His client agreed. But first, the client had to make one phone call. Harris watched as he went outside and started pacing. “And then he takes the cigarette out,” Harris said. “It was his father.”
That father advised his son that they shouldn’t offer above asking, not because he had toured the home and uncovered a flaw but because he had fixated on a detail he saw online: The house was 18 feet wide. The father believed it was priced as if it were 20. They insisted on putting in an offer at $1.6M, or $50,000 below the asking price of $1.65M. The house ultimately sold for $150,000 over asking — to someone else. “It would have been very nice if they’d listened,” Harris said, not only because his client regrets losing that townhouse but because, more than a year later, Harris, an agent with Coldwell Banker Warburg, is still taking the same client to showings. “I can’t get that time back.”