Finally I said that is enough, no more

Wow! What a relief. Finally after more than 1 ½ years working with one of my client, I told her you cannot find the property with your requirement in your designated locations with that low price and any more search is wasting your time and my time. Therefore, if you need to bring your expectation lower or increase your price higher. Otherwise, I will be glad to introduce you to other agents or you find other agent at your own choice. Though, I feel uncomfortable, but I am relieved!

Cultural Differences:
My client is from a culture that in their county they almost never buy or pay the asking price. They negotiate so much and looking for very good bargain for almost everything. That is true for all merchandise in local and independent stores, real estate transactions including leases, foods and fruits from independent stores, furniture’s, etc.

That goes both ways, the seller knows he has to come down his prices during negotiations, so he jacks up the prices sometimes ridiculously high. The buyer, as a habit, offers very low price to start with and negotiation starts until both reach agreement. Depending on merchandise and price, e.g., clothing, the buyer might buy the cloths about half the asking price. However, the seller gets smaller profit but never loses. This is the lengthy process and both sellers and buyers expecting happens.

However, applying this technique or habit in U.S. stores, such as in a franchises department store,  where all prices are fixed and tagged not only doesn’t work but becomes annoying too. Many of them, at least in last year, were expecting 50% reduction of asking real estate prices, because they have heard from media the economy was not doing good, local market was bad, many foreclosures were coming to the market, etc. They do not realize that though those news might be somehow valid for some parts of country (e.g., California, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Florida, etc), but they are not true for most of other parts of country. For example, in Texas where real estate did not hit as bad as many other places, not only the prices did not go down that much, in some areas such as Collin County the prices have gone up and there are shortages of houses and inventories.

Now I know some of you say it is my fault and I must have educated them, believe it or not I have explained and show them statistics so many times, but still that is in their thinking process.

Hopefully nobody thinks I am bad mouthing about a specific culture. I know this culture and know how the thought process works because I am from that culture, but I don’t agree with it.