Dear Home Seller: A Letter From Your Prospective Buyers

 [Note: This is a draft from 2015 but I thought it worth publishing. Some think a buyer’s letter to a seller is a smart move, others don’t. I think it has everything to do with what’s in that letter. This is an example of perhaps what not to write, borrowed slightly from one that was with an offer once. The buyer was not our client. ]

Dear Home Seller:

You have not lowered your price sufficiently to satisfy our desire to subjugate you to our will, so we thought we’d dazzle you with the beauty of our family in an effort to make you forget math. Our names are Cornelius and Contessa, and we live with our son Aristotle and our exotic breed dog, Loki. 

We’ve been looking for a second home to unwind from our Manhattan apartment (elevators, doormen- sheesh it can get crazy, right?) for several years and you are about the 7th homeowner we’ve engaged. Yes, it was a severe buyer’s market when we started out and it is now more of a market favoring the seller, but we press on. Fortune favors the bold, right? 

As you can tell from the attached pictures, Contessa’s uterus is in fine working order, and Cornelius’s semen is teeming with strong swimming, fertile spermatozoa. That’s how we got Aristotle, and we like to photograph him with Loki in whacky situations. We hope you like the one attached. We also like to take selfies in exotic locations with palm trees in the background (see attched). As you can certainly relate, we’re just like everybody else, that is, if “everybody else” is a a college educated, dual profession family from the Upper East Side who set a life goal of a second home before the age of 40.  

We want to make it clear that we really, really love your property. Not enough to offer you anything close to asking price or even your latest aggressive counter offer, but we love it all the same. We can see ourselves sitting on your deck, sipping Moscow Mules, feeling superior about how we rammed our negotiation position down your throat. We can totally see ourselves entertaining our friends from Manhattan in that living room with the fireplace roaring, deftly avoiding direct answers about why we didn’t get a place in the Hamptons (ker ching, right?).

Anyway, we thought that sharing our obtuse conceit about how photogenic we are would sway your attachment to your bottom line and get the show on the road so we can close this thing before we hit our time share in Aruba this August. If you, like us, agree that we are utterly clipart beautiful and are entitled to your property at a sufficiently discounted price, please just do the right thing. 

God bless, 

Cornelius, Contessa, Aristotle and Loki.