I think it was two weeks ago (definately no more than three). We’d looked at the John Laing homes before and the office in the previous weeks had been full but it was a Sunday afternoon and they were pretty slow. They had only one other couple there who was asking a lot of questions about prices of the upgrades (which they declined to show us a copy of the price list…they apparently won’t provide that until after you sign the papers). Anyway we were talking with an older lady there for probably 20-30 minutes about the area and let her know we were very skeptical about the market…yada yada yada. We pointed out that the house they had availble just fell out of escrow. In the end, she asked if we were interested and we let her know that we liked it, but didn’t think it was worth more than $650K so she said that she could work it out. Were it not for the high mello-roos and property taxes we would have been tempted.
We have a friend who is an agent who thought we were insane for not trying to get them to throw in the mello roos and take the offer (she said that the builders will sometimes pay the mello roos if you ask them to–I’m not sure how common that is). Like I said, we’ve never delt with builders before and weren’t aware that it was unusual for them to negotiate.
