8 Strategies To Get Your Offer Accepted
8 Strategies To Get Your Offer Accepted
If you’re out there looking to buy a home, you know that it’s brutal out there. It’s competitive. There’s many, many offers on the same house. It’s hard to get your offer accepted. So this week I have for you eight things that you can do to make your offer more attractive to sellers, so you can get your offer accepted. So let’s get into those eight things. So the first one is your real estate agent, to have them call the listing agent and talk to them about what the seller is really looking for.
There might be something unique that the seller is looking for, that you can put in your offer in order to make your offer more attractive to that particular seller. So one of those things, and this is my second of the eight things you can do to make your offer more attractive, is to offer the seller a rent-back.
This might be something that the seller wants. What is a rent-back?
A rent-back is where the seller basically sells you the home, and then they rent it back from you for a period of time, whether it’s a couple days, a week, a month. Now the longest we can do, as a lender if you’re buying an owner occupied property, a primary residence, is 60 days. Otherwise, you have to buy the property as an investment property. Because on a primary residence, the guidelines say you have to move in within 60 days. So that’s something to keep in mind. But that can be an attractive thing to a seller in this market because of the uncertainty for them to find another house. Because when they sell the house, they become a buyer. So that could be a really good thing.
The third thing that can make your offer more attractive is to close fast. Closing faster than the big bank offers. When people go in with offers from Wells Fargo, the bigger banks, they are notoriously slow and unresponsive. So to be able to go in with an offer where you can close quickly and efficiently, that can be really attractive to the seller, too.
The next thing is, is for your real estate agent and lender to text the other agent their online reviews. So to have a lender and a realtor that have a good online presence and can send over their reviews by text, so that the listing agent can see that they’re working with a professional team on the other end has a good reputation for closing on time.
The next one is, is to write a love letter to the seller. Write a letter to the seller explaining your situation, talking about your family, how you envision yourself in their home, what you like about their home. This can go a long ways towards giving the seller that emotional connection to you as the buyer, and might put a leg up for you compared to another offer that’s similar to your offer. The next thing is, is for your lender to call the listing agent and talk to them about how strong your preapproval is. Now, of course, we do this. But of course, we don’t share details, specific details about your situation. But we do talk about the strength of your file, the fact that we’ve documented everything properly.
And also, this goes into the seventh thing that can make your offer more attractive, the fact that we have a pre-approval checklist. We’ve gone through an in-depth checklist to make sure that we don’t miss anything, and that we’re not going to run into problems once we’re under contract. Because there’s nothing more frustrating for anybody, especially in this market, if you go under contract on the house, and then find out a week or two later that you can’t do the financing. And then the last one is if you’re out looking at condos or considering condos, is to have a lender that is an expert on condo financing and to communicate that to the seller. So for example, Fairway has a database of condo complexes that we’ve reviewed.
So we can look up the condo complex to see if it’s an improved complex because condos have to go through… The HOA has to go through an approval process that can sometimes be a little bit arduous, but we can get clues as to whether or not the condo complex is acceptable ahead of time before you make the offer and we can communicate that to the seller. We also do a lot of condos in my office. So we’re experts on how to creatively finance your condo financing, so that you can, A, have a little bit easier guidelines on that condo approval, and B, obtain a better interest rate. So those are my eight things to make your offer more accepted or more appealing to a seller.
