Negotiating and Submitting an Offer

One of the best reasons to hire a real estate agent is to ensure you have someone representing your best interests. Also, having someone to negotiate on your behalf will minimize the emotional stress of the home buying process.

When you make an offer on a home, the seller can accept, decline, or counter it. Some tips to increase the chances of your offer being accepted include:

• Ensure you are pre-approved by a lender.

• Provide a substantial money deposit

• Limit your contingencies only to those that are important to you, like financing and inspections, and sale of your current home, if applicable

• Offer a fair price based on the marketplace

Here's a great article by Dian Hymer, distributed by Inman News Features:

What is the Best Negotiation Strategy?

In a seller's market, where houses are selling quickly for the list price or more, you may want to start out with your best possible offer. In a slow market, where houses may take months to sell, and there are plenty of houses to choose from, you may want to make a lower offer and negotiate from there toward a mutually acceptable price.

Before you sit down to write up your offer, find out how much interest there is in the property. Your agent should be able to find answers to these questions: Are other buyers considering making offers? Have other offers already been written? Is the house being shown often, or barely at all? If you are making an offer without the threat of a competing offer, you will adopt a very different negotiation strategy than you will if other buyers want the house.

In a slow market, you might bid low initially, and then jump up in price if necessary. If you're trying to buy a listing that's over-priced, the negotiations may take time. You may have to inch along, moving up a little in price with each counteroffer.

FIRST-TIME TIP: The split-the-difference approach works more often than you would think. This occurs when the buyers and sellers agree on a price that is half way between their last prices.

Successful negotiations usually involve give and take on the part of both parties. The ideal negotiation is when both the buyers and sellers come away feeling like winners. This is called a win-win situation.

It's important to strive for a win-win negotiation. There's a lot of emotion involved in a home sale transaction. And, it's often hard for sellers to be unbiased and detached when selling something as personal as their home.

You want the sellers to feel good about selling their home to you because you will want their cooperation during the transaction. You may need to have further negotiations with them after the inspections are done. Problems could arise, even after closing. If you have built a good rapport with the sellers, you'll have an easier time working out all the issues related to the sale.

Our objective as your agent would be to get you the best home under the best conditions. Contact The Davidson Team with any questions you may have about the negotiating process.