Thanks to Ryan and Jeff and especially to Jeneane for their helpful advice on the Caravan situation. I favor Jeneane’s suggestion, but I have even less experience working on ponies than I do on cars, plus I think they’re probably not allowed under Evanston’s zoning laws (though I could try to make an appeal on First Amendment grounds, arguing that this involved my humble effort toward the imitatio Christi).
So, what happened immediately after I posted the last blog? I looked up on one of the cars-for-sale websites and saw that somebody was selling a 1996 Outback for $8,700—exactly the model and price-neighborhood we’d been searching for. We called right up, and the owner pleasantly invited us over to look and to test-drive the car, but she forewarned us that two other callers were interested, also.
We walked out to Wilmette to check the car out (with a scenic detour, since Wilmette and Evanston divide along the the street on which our owner lives, and the two municipalities number their streets differently, and the owner’s home lies on the opposite side of the commuter transit tracks and the Chicago River canal from the Wilmette address that corespond’s to the owner’s address), arriving after another couple of prospective buyers. The owner won us over immediately with her light-hearted manner and agreeable candor; we test-drove the Subaru (which is just right, all things considered), and agreed that we'd pay asking price and would probably go over asking price if we were bidding against another buyer, though we can’t say how much. We’ll be in touch with her later.
The kicker, though, was that she asked how we got her number, and we said, “On the web, of course” (duh!). It turns out that she had advertised on the Web two weeks ago and not heard a peep. She then went out to area supermarkets and put up tear-off posters, and the two callers against whom we [might] be bidding both came to her from the ads. So, if I had bothered to look at the web thingy a day or so earlier, we could have gotten the car right away, and with no bidding process. Am I kicking myself? Do you need to ask?
Posted by AKMA at November 9, 2002 06:39 PM | TrackBack