Just like buses, you wait ages for one (buyer) and then two come along at once. Or do they? The stories that Juan Sartori was going to take over, potentially with another investor, have been circulating as long as stories that Americans had been for a tour of the facilities in the summer and might be interested depending on other business interests.
Then we heard that a takeover would be completed by the end of next month… every month.
And after all these months, two stories are leaked/become public around the same time. But why? It would be inappropriate to speculate where these stories have come from, so we won’t. Instead, here’s a random story about selling a house.
When you look round a house that you’re considering buying, it is amazing how many interested buyers you’ll be told there are. The especially unscrupulous seller might try and arrange for two potential buyers to look around at almost the same time to try and force a bid out or, at the very least, make sure both potential buyers know of each other’s existence.
This normally happens when the seller of the house is getting desperate to sell. That desperation is often because of two reasons, money problems, or because there’s something wrong with the house and they don’t really want to pay for putting it right themselves.
Mortgage payments is the first of two cash flow problems which tend to happen when the lender is starting to ask for their money back and might even be thinking of calling the loan in and taking the assets of the owner as previously agreed.
Of course, keeping up with costs generally with a house can be problematic if the sources of income you’d expected to have dry up. Again, this can encourage sellers to try and force the hand of potential buyers by highlighting that, if they don’t act, the other bloke might get in first.
The problem there is that, once both parties have realised how desperate the sellers are, they’ll play hard ball which can drag the process out.
And what about avoiding costs for repairing the house? Well, most costs will obviously fall to the new owners, things like repairing the stair lift in the kid’s room or putting new carpet in the dining room will be factored into the price.
But sometimes, when close to selling, the owners are tempted to leave a draft coming through the door for the new owner to deal with rather than accept that the whole house and everyone who lives there is cold and fed up with the whole parky situation caused by the draft and just wants it sorted, even temporarily, until the new owner can set everything up properly.
The homeowner is, sadly, likely to try and ignore the draft and hope the deal is done before the new owners notice how horrific the parky problem actually is.
The good news is, once these signs become obvious, the house tends to be sold quite quickly to one of the interested parties. It just becomes a stand-off as to whether the seller needs the money enough to accept an offer or is prepared to keep hanging on for the other party to bid.
And sometime the homeowner is also trying to ignore the idiot chancer who keeps turning up, looking round with a can of Smart Price energy drink who doesn’t bid but tells everyone in the pub he’s moving in next week.
Anyone watching for a house near them to be sold shouldn’t believe everything they hear, especially if it seems to come from the sellers, or one of the buyers, but hearing the names of potential buyers probably means it’s getting close.
I’d expect the next sign to be the current owners sorting the parky issue. Fingers crossed that’s very soon.
