Anyway, my reasons for wanting to find out any information about the loan balances/lender(s) is pretty juvenile. I like to know as much about the other person I’m dealing with on the other side of the table as possible….I just want get a rough idea how financially sound or not the seller is and use this into considering possibly how much “wiggle” room he/she has. It’s just one extra datapoint, albeit probably a not very useful one.
I can’t say this information was too useful for me alone….BUT, back in 2004 for our primary purchase, the specific house we purchased in 2004 fell out of escrow from the first buyer. The owner was original, and I snooped around a bit to roughly figure out they had a few refinances and/or helocs takeouts and guessed based on talking to them too that they just wanted out as a motivation for sale. I talked with them a bit (ok, I applied a small amount of social engineering), and yes found out that some of the reasons why they refied x times and why they are selling. We guessed the seller was still sort of bummed things fell out of escrow 2 weeks prior and because they seemed to want a definite “out” in the near future, and they might be more willing to compromise.
For the hell of it, we made an offer well below the previous buyer’s price, and well below the listing price not expecting it to bite…Though to mollify the seller from being insulted by a much lowered offer, my wife applied her sweet personality while personally delivering the offer directly to the owners and telling them “how perfect the home would be to raise a family, how we hard we worked and saved our hard earned dollars for *this* specific home, how she could see how this home was the one for our family, and how lucky you were to have raised a great family in this wonderful home”, yada yada yada yada. (The offer was put together by our agent… but we figured we’d try to route the offer through the seller->agent rather than agent->seller to try to soften them up a bit…)
Not sure if any one specific did it, but it turns out out offer was accepted. I know, this isn’t that much of a “deal” considering this was bubble-2004 and considering where RE is going..BUT, considering other comparable homes ended up in bidding wars (that we refused to participate in), this was as good as a deal as we were going to get in 2004…
The only thing else I would have done differently is perhaps gotten two of my friends to enter into a bidding war for that home, going into escrow, only to terminate the escrow 17days prior. That might have worked to soften the seller even more after 2-3 deals falls out of escrow. But, frankly, I didn’t think about it until afterwards. And that would have been borderline jackaxxish. Plus 2005 was kinda a crazy year, so who knows how that would have turned out.
In short, my general rule of engagement is know your friends close, know your strangers closer, at least more than they know you, because you never know when the extra information will be useful. Plus, I negotiate everything (even if it no longer financially makes sense). While, MSRP may change over time, I never pay MSRP at any instance in time, it’s just not in my blood. Forgive me, I’m asian.
