Affordable Housing Institute : US

So thoroughly tongue-in-cheek is the lede of this New York Times article regarding the competition for width bragging rights:
 

A DREAM COME TRUE At 18 feet wide, the average town house provides luxurious space in a crowded city, but there is always the fantasy of a wider house, with three, or even four windows across the […]

As the market trembles, cresting or not, behavior of buyers and sellers is shifting, as this New York Times article reveals:
 
“Right now, buyers are daring to put offers that are under the asking price - I just got one for 8 percent under asking,” said Jacky Teplitzky, an executive vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman,
 
That […]

Though the words are often confused, they need to be distinguished:
 

Bargaining versus negotiation
 
Bargaining is uni-variant: establishing a price to trade a fixed and defined commodity between seller and buyer.
Negotiation is multi-variant: designing the optimal transaction where multiple variables are in play in defined a variable commodity.

 
Bargaining is the Arabian bazaar:
 

 
I have a pot I […]

“There is a tide in the affairs of deals
That taken at the flood, leads on to asking prices.”
  – Brutus, managing partner of Brutus, Cassius, and Messala
 

 
Fear sells, no matter how often proved groundless or premature.  For weeks if not months now the print media have been pounding the drums that US home prices have […]

In yet another very close decision, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to approve New London’s eminent domain taking of several homes in Fort Trumbull.  I’ve blogged this at length and also blogged the oral arguments, so the decision is not exactly surprising.
 
I’m in Nairobi now on AHI business — working with the Kenyan Ministry of […]