Buy my house, but I’m taking the toilet

the sellers insisted on keeping the kitchen appliances and the washer and dryer. If the buyers wanted them, they could pay $10,000, a premium for secondhand Samsung appliances. The buyers were livid, as the demand was not mentioned in the listing for the $430,000 apartment.

“They felt it was very petty and cheap to throw it in there at the last minute,” said Jack Chiu, an associate broker with Douglas Elliman representing the buyers. He said they would have altered their offer had they known the appliances were excluded. “It hit them from left field.”

The buyers considered other apartments, but had gotten this one after winning an eight-way bidding war, following eight months of disappointments. “They were just so tired because they were outbid so many times,”

Chiu said.

They agreed to let the sellers take the appliances, and signed the contract. The buyers have started looking at appliances so they don’t move into an apartment with a stripped kitchen, but their first priority is securing a loan and getting approved by the co-op board so they can close in September.

Other demands are purely sentimental. In Monroe, New York, Amy Wilhelm, a salesperson at Corcoran Baer & McIntosh, was stunned when her client told her that she wanted to take the toilet in the main bathroom.

The self-cleaning toilet lights up and the lid automatically opens when you walk in the room. But the seller wanted it for a deeply personal reason: Her husband, who had recently died, had wanted the toilet so much that he had jokingly filled a toilet fund jar. “This toilet was their running joke,” Wilhelm said.