Our car shopping adventure is done. I (Amy) called “Uncle” after test driving just one car. The thought of going to three additional dealerships to test drive cars I was only lukewarm about made me cringe. I just couldn’t do it. My time is valuable. Car shopping stinks. It took us 2.5 hours to test drive and sit with the salesperson at Dealership #1. I didn’t have 7.5+ more hours to spend doing this. Plus negotiating time. Cars just don’t mean that much to me. What I’ve picked is good enough and now we can continue on with our lives.
I wonder if house hunting is this painful for some people? I haven’t really had any clients that seem to despise house hunting. Maybe it’s because I’m so much fun to be with. I think what I’ve done with our car search is the equivalent to looking at a bunch of houses online, picking the one I think will best suit our needs from the pictures, going for a visit, saying “good enough,” and then sitting down to write an offer. Not many people do that. The fewest number of houses I’ve shown a client before they found their house is two. Everyone else typically looks at 15-25 houses. Some people look at 50+ houses. They must REALLY enjoy my company.
Cars are a commodity. Once you know the model and options you want there are typically multiple dealerships you can go to in order to negotiate. A home is unique and you really only have one seller to negotiate with. Kyle is going to write a future post about our negotiating experience. I’m not allowed to write that post because the process made me angry. I would write bad things. So I’m being censored for my own good.
For those who care, we ended up going with the Volvo XC70. Nice enough to drive clients around in, safe enough to carry our kid, and enough cargo space to carry all of the open house signage. After taking it for a few spins, it’s been named Otto, joining its older brother Leif, the Volvo V70 that we already owned.
Now, distraction over. Back to work!