Rescuing a deal

I have been nurturing a lucrative potential deal for months now, and have very nearly torpedoed it just at the point where it could have been closed out. We'll see whether I can rescue it.

The vendor is owner of an Edwardian freehold terraced property in a once-prosperous but now very quiet old dockland village near Bristol. Two floors are already sold on long leases, but she has closed the (held by her freehold, still, of course) ground floor shop, because of poor trading.

She is carrying a mortgage, and is desperate to sell. The outstanding mortgage is about half what the property is worth, and all she wants to do is get shot of that plus a bit extra to keep afloat.

Seems straight forward enough, then; even though chances of monthly cash-flow look slim - so what have I done wrong?

I've offered her too low a price -and point-blank at that (which is seemingly the greater of the two errors).

How so? Because she wants to sell her own home as well, which again has about 50% equity. I did some sums on what might be the minimum price she could possibly sell the double-package at, and offered her that.

Except that I forgot to include the £20,000 minimum she hoped to take away to put down as a deposit on a new home elsewhere.

Fortunately, I have a business partner, working with me to try to make something out of this deal opportunity - so I intend to apologise profusely to the vendor, cover myself in shame, and hope to introduce my colleague as a knight in shining armour who can come and rescue the situation.

That wasn't my intention, and I'll never hit someone below the belt again - even by accident, I hope - but we'll see how this works out now.

What would you do?

Probably you would think about the person, not just the maths.

I'm learning this is really a people business.