Offbeat deals Sometimes closing a home sale takes a little sweetener
Home sales are often contingent upon inspections and financing. But swans, toilet seats and old Chevys?
As spring homebuying season gets underway, we asked central Ohio real-estate agents to share some of their strangest deals.
Such deals can illustrate the resourcefulness of agents, but even agents know they can’t salvage every transaction.
“We were inspecting one home with the buyer,” said Mike Huber, an HER Realtors agent in Powell.
“We opened up the electrical box, the breaker box, and noticed snakeskins. Then we started looking around further and looked in the crawlspace and discovered it was overrun with snakes. It was shocking, really. The snakes killed that deal. You can’t win them all.”
Following are six deals with happier endings.
Special swans
Last year, real-estate agents Julie Wills and David Armentrout, partners in a Westerville HER Realtors office, represented the buyer of a large property outside Galena. The deal had its challenges but none as strange as the one reflected in an addendum the seller added to the contract.
Eager to ensure that the swans and pilgrim geese on the property would be cared for, the seller added a clause stating that the fowl could not be sold, removed or given away; that the geese’s favorite pond must be kept ice-free through the winter; and that the birds must be regularly fed with a specific type of feed.
“I’ve been through hundreds and hundreds of transactions, and this was the most out-of-the-box one I’ve seen,” Wills said. “It was just bizarre.”
Armentrout’s thoughts turned to the practical when he saw the demand.
“I thought, how do you know which geese are whose?” he said. “And what happens if a fox comes in and kills one of them? Does it have to be replaced?”
The buyers, Cindy and Scott Nicolette, were ready to walk when Armentrout advised them to agree to the condition.
“We basically said, ‘Sign it.’ The seller was moving out of state. What was he going to do, hire the geese police to sit across the street and watch?”
The deal closed — and came with an unexpected ending. The buyers’ resentment toward the geese morphed into affection. The animals have become so close to the family that they go on walks together.
“They are so cute,” said Mrs. Nicolette. “My kids have named them, but don’t ask me. I can’t tell them apart.”
Sports contract
About a decade ago, Virgil Mathias, a Coldwell Banker King Thompson agent, represented a Dublin homeseller who was a big Columbus Blue Jackets fan.
Coincidentally, a prominent Blue Jackets player made an offer on the home. The seller was happy with the offer but asked Mathias to request something to sweeten the deal.
“I put into the counteroffer that the player provide two autographed jerseys and two hockey sticks to the seller and myself, which of course he complied with,” Mathias said. “It didn’t make any difference to him, and the seller was thrilled.”
Classic car
Before Huber, the agent who dealt with the snakeskins, moved to central Ohio, he represented the buyer and seller of a property in Ashland who couldn’t agree on a price.
“The buyer wasn’t going to come up and the seller was reluctant to come down,” Huber said. “I said to the seller, ‘Let’s do something creative. Is there anything you can add to sweeten the pot?’ He said, ‘I’ve got this 1970 Impala.’ I knew the buyer was a car guy, and this certainly piqued his interest.”
Huber and the buyer discovered a pleasant surprise when they checked out the Chevy.
The car turned out to be a true collector’s item: two-door, 18,000 original miles, stored in winter, with a backseat that the seller said had never been sat in. The car’s estimated value of about $30,000 was twice the distance between the buyer’s and seller’s prices.
The buyer was sold, so the closing included two titles: to the house and to the car.
“Fortunately, it was a cash purchase,” Huber added. “You couldn’t do that in a normal financing.”
Toilet treasure
Normally, items physically attached to a home, such as lighting and plumbing fixtures, stay with the house. But in a sale a few years ago in which Wendy Fautz represented the buyer, the seller insisted on taking one unusual item: the toilet seat.
“In contract, the seller noted that the toilet seat had a special meaning for them,” recalled Fautz, an HER Realtors agent in Lithopolis. “It was a wooden toilet seat that had been carved by a family member.”
When she mentioned the condition to the buyers, they didn’t hesitate.
“They thought it was very weird. But they were very agreeable to letting the owners take it.”
Garden bargain
When representing a Whitehall family bidding on a home in Olde Towne East several years ago, Joe Jackson, an agent with Keller Williams Capital Partners, was invited to the family’s house for pizza.
“They said, ‘ This dinner is very important to the negotiations.’ I was puzzled, and they said they grew the green peppers and tomatoes used to make the pizza and wanted to ask the seller permission to plant peppers and tomatoes in the yard before closing on the Olde Towne East house so they would have a garden to harvest that year.”
The family was competing with other bidders for the house, but when the sellers saw the request, which the buyers put into a letter, they knew whom to sell the home to.
“They said, ‘ These people really want to buy our home. We’re going to choose their contract,’” recalled Jackson. “We closed. They planted the garden before moving in and had green peppers and tomatoes that year.” Joe Jackson
Horse trade
When Chris Hebert was sales manager for Ambassador Homes in Columbus, the homebuilder sold a home to a buyer ... on one four- legged condition. The deal was contingent upon the buyer selling his horse, which would give him enough for the down payment.
Hebert, now a partner with HER Realtors, thought, “Why not?”
“He did sell the horse, and everything worked out fine,” Hebert recalled with a laugh.