The Apartment on Janusz Korczak Street

In the early '80s we lived in a very small apartment (about 50 square meters) on Janusz Korczak Street in Haifa. Our eldest, Tali, was about two, and then our son Nir was born. The apartment was already too small for a family of four, so we decided it was time to move.

An apartment twice the size (100 square meters) in the same building had sold a short while earlier for around $100,000. Our little place was worth about $50,000 on a good day.

After an intensive search, we found a six-room cottage with its own parking and a garden in Ramat Golda, a very upscale neighborhood in Haifa. My wife and I ran the numbers and found that even if we took the biggest mortgage we could get, borrowed against our insurance and from the bank, sold my wife's Autobianchi and sold ourselves into slavery, we'd still need about $80,000 to make the move.

So I told my wife we'd sell our apartment for $80,000, and she believed me without a moment's hesitation.

We advertised the apartment in the local paper and the calls started coming in.

On the phone I used the standard telemeeting script, where you book an appointment without giving the caller too many details about the property...

Buyers started showing up, and I asked $82,500 for the apartment...

Some of them lit into me (quite rightly) and asked, "Who came up with that price?"... "What did you drag us out here for?"... "You're not quite right in the head"... and so on. There was even one couple who toured the apartment and asked at the end, "OK, and where's the rest of it???"

But I used those first interactions to build a winning approach. After the fourth or fifth viewer, I told my wife, "The next buyer who walks in here is going to buy the apartment." And she believed me without hesitation.

My wife, even though she was my very first student and had worked in sales for years herself, couldn't bear to watch the intense sales process I was running. So every time a buyer was due, she'd put our son in the stroller and flee the house.

I prepared the house carefully. Everything was in its place. I knew exactly what I was going to do, which window to stop at to take in the view, where to start and where to finish.

On the living room table sat a yellow legal pad and a pen, ready for the "close."

And then a couple of about 30 arrived. They toured the apartment with me, and at the end I led them into the living room and said, "Sit down!" So they sat...

I made coffee, we chatted about everything under the sun (except the apartment), and at the right moment I asked them, "How are you fixed for money?"

"We've already sold our apartment, but we don't have the full amount you're asking," they said.

My face fell, but after a short pause I asked, "How much do you have?"

"$80,000," they said.

To this day I don't know where I found the nerve, but I answered, "Too bad. We won't be able to sell at that price!"...

A minute before they got up to leave, I mused out loud, "You know what? My wife should be back any minute, she took the baby out for a walk. I'll ask her, and if she agrees, maybe we can move forward."

I'll never forget the moment my wife walked through the front door, sure the buyers had already left. I introduced her to the nice couple and explained that they didn't have the amount we'd asked for, and that with a great deal of effort they could only raise $80,000. "What do you say?" I asked.

My wife barely managed to clear her dry throat: "OK, let them have it..." Then she turned around and fled back out to the street.

The apartment was sold, we moved into that cottage, where we still live today, and the whole thing was forgotten.

About ten years later I opened a course, one of the many dozens I ran in those days at MATI (Israel's small-business development centers), and I spotted a familiar face among the participants. I couldn't place him. At the time I was also teaching marketing at the University of Haifa and the Technion, so I figured he'd been one of my students and let it go.

At the end of the first day of training, he came up to me and asked, "Don't you recognize me?"

"I'm sorry," I said. "You look familiar, but I can't place you."

"I bought a two-room apartment from you at a penthouse price," he said, "and I'm here to learn how you do that!"...

We became friends during the course. He even came to a refresher session held a few months later, and when he was about to sell that same apartment and move to Tivon, he came to me for advice on technique...

The moral:

Two main ingredients came together here: the determination to sell, at a high price, here and now; and the detailed advance planning of how I would sell, along with all the practice I got on buyers who were never going to buy.

When I put that yellow pad and pen on the table, I knew I would end the tour in the living room and that I had to try to close.

Maybe a sense of urgency, and of having no other choice, joined all of those ingredients...