Sellers: Here’s what to look for in an offer besides price.
As a home seller, price is obviously a crucial factor in any offer you accept. However, there are three other things you should look for in an offer to truly know its strength:
1. Time periods. How long does the buyer need to handle the physical inspection, appraisal, and loan contingencies? Specifically, you want the physical contingency to be as tight as possible. This is the time where the buyer is ‘dating’ the property they’re investigating it, seeing what problems it has, and making a commitment to become ‘engaged’ to it. Once they’re ‘engaged’ to the property, they’ll remove this contingency and move forward with the ‘marriage’ (i.e., closing). Once they do this, it’s just a matter of getting the financing together, which brings me to my second point.
“You want the physical contingency to be as tight as possible.”
2. Financing. This is especially important if your property will likely go over its appraised value, because your buyer will need extra cash. You need to make certain they have the money to do what they want to do and have the ability to get a loan for the additional amount that’s needed for the property to close. Their approval needs to be valid, and there can’t be any issues.
3. Closing costs. This can include termite work, the allocation of costs for escrow and title, etc. Sometimes the closing costs can mean the difference between two offers that look similar, but one is slightly better by up to $5,000 due to the way its closing costs are structured.
If you’d like to know more about choosing the best offer for your home or have any real estate questions at all, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I look forward to hearing from you. Make it a great day!
