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Negotiation

 

As we were interested in the abandoned village we needed to see if we could afford it. On the website it was stated it was € 350.000 for options 1. Option 1 being 20 houses with an extra optional land. That immediately was our full budget. So we were hoping the price could include the land.

It was also much higher than our other option which was € 50.000 for 10 ruïnes.

When we got our tour the first thing Marcelino said was that the price was € 350.000 so it did not sound that there was much room to negotiate but we tried nevertheless.

First step was to add the optional land. As we were planning to create a food forest, for us that was the most important. 

During the tour he said it would not be a problem and within some weeks he had sent us the image below without any explanation.

Our guess was that the black crosses where the parts we could buy. So that seemed perfect. 

I checked the 'cadastral' website and it seemed that the land would be about 6 hectares. It was really a guess as some parts of the land were not one plot but a combination of about 10 plots.

First Marcelino came with some suggestions. The land including 20 houses for € 350.000. Which was doable but what would happen with the other 50 and still it would be a high price per ruïne. Some 'houses' were not even ruïnes but just ground. We got a couple of proposals with every time different amount of houses and it was not clear how much land we could get.

So after some emails back and forth I took the initiative. I knew that that was a fair price for the land, so we agreed on that.

Then the difficult part: what to pay for the piles of stone, I mean the houses. I compared it with some other projects and talked to some people like Marjolein and suggested to go for € 4.500 per plot. That was quite a jump, since in their last proposal it was 60 houses for € 350.000 which was about € 6.000 per plot.

The broker immediately responded that it was too low, that he had many projects where prices where higher but he said he would talk to Marcelino nevertheless.  

After a stressful week of waiting they came with a response of € 5.000. Which was getting there. I agreed for that price if it would be the north part only (about 50 houses) or to go for € 4.750 if it would be all houses.

Some days later we had a deal for the latter, all the houses. Now they could start working on the contracts. So that would be about € 280.000 for the 59 houses and € 60.000 for the land. A total of € 340.000. Add 10% costs to buy it and we would go just a bit above our budget.

Maybe a boring story to read but we were really happy and in shock about what we were actually going to do...




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