Here are five tips to help you get your offer accepted in today’s market.
On just about every listing that I bring in, I’m receiving as many as 15 offers from interested buyers. That’s tough competition if you’re in the market to purchase a home. As a buyer, what can you do to make your offer stand out so that the seller is more likely to pick yours? Here are a couple of tips that can help ensure you’ll win in this crazy real estate market:
1. Hire a professional agent. Not all agents are equal, so ensure that you’re working with someone who has a proven track record of success when it comes to navigating their clients to win in the end. Ask them to share past stories of what they’ve done to ensure their clients got their offers accepted.
2. Have your finances lined up. By that, I mean you should have your pre-approval ready, but some sellers have been asking buyers to present their credit scores, proofs of income, and bank statements—be sure to have those documents ready so you don’t have to spend time gathering them together. Time is of the essence when it comes to placing an offer.
“Sellers want the transaction to go smoothly and with as few headaches as possible.”
3. Make your offer as clean as possible. Make sure that your offer has few or no contingencies. In the past, some buyers have made their offers contingent on being able to sell their own homes, but that just won’t fly in today’s hot market. Every seller is looking for a buyer who is ready, willing, and able to purchase.
4. Waive the appraisal contingency. In a typical real estate market, the appraiser will look back as far as six months for comparable sales to come up with the value on the property they’re appraising. The way that the market is escalating these days, a lot of documentation from six months ago won’t be relevant today. If your appraisal comes in a little bit lower than the sales price, you should be willing to waive the appraisal contingency; in this market, prices are increasing and the banks simply haven’t caught up with the data.
5. Take the stress off the seller. I’ve seen sellers choose an offer with less money because the buyer was flexible and accommodated their needs. For example, I was selling a home in Whitestone, and we had multiple offers on it. The buyer who ended up getting the deal agreed to take the house as is. The seller lived out of state and didn’t want to come back to deal with all the furniture and other things on the property, so that was a clever move on the buyer’s part. At the end of the day, the sellers want the transaction to go smoothly and with as few headaches as possible.
If you have any questions about the market or real estate in general, feel free to reach out to me. I’m always here to be of service.
