Are you buying a house and want to know how to make an offer to the seller? The first thing you are going to do is sit down with your Realtor® and you’re going to put together an offer, in writing, to present to the seller. The first part of that for me is to go over the comparables with the buyer. To make sure we understand what the market value is, and decide how much we think a fair market value offer is and then put that into writing.
The next step is to work through our contingencies and decide what we need to include in this offer to protect us and to give us ways out, to cancel the offer if there is a problem. Those would include inspections, financing, appraisal, and if you have a home to sell, a home sale contingency. You want to make sure that all your contingencies are properly represented.
We then want to weigh all of those to the market. Is it a strong seller market or strong buyer market? Is there anything that we can do to make our offer stronger if we really want this home? So we want to actually sit down and discuss all of those contingencies, put them down in writing, and decide do we need help with assistance on closing cost? What’s our closing date going to be? All of these are the terms of the offer, you’ve got your price, and terms, and together these make up the offer. We are going to put this all together and we’re going to sign off on everything.
Next we are going to send it over to the listing side of the transaction. That typically gets delivered right to the listing agent, not to the seller. The listing agent will then deliver ALL offers to the seller to review. But the seller is not required to respond in writing to any offer. So even if you sent them an offer for full price and they don’t respond, there’s no yelling at them, but I’d say on average we typically see a seller respond within two days. Depending on weekend, holidays, and things like that, it may take a little bit longer. So it’s important to understand that there may be a little stress while you wait. Make the offer that’s best for you and if it gets accepted you’ll be excited and if it doesn’t you’ll know if was just not the right property for the price that you were willing to pay. There is always another great home to be found if the offer does not work out.
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By Steve Bradley
