I wanted to talk to you as a nice followup to last week, where we talked about how to price a listing in a competitive market. I want to now go to the other side of the transaction, and I want to talk about how do we craft and write and position an offer for acceptance in an equally competitive and challenging market.

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And I think all of us as real estate agents and brokers around the country are feeling the squeeze. Tight inventory, competitive markets, multiple offers over list price, and finding a way to represent our buying clients best interests.

We must protect their rights while helping them secure their property of their dreams. It presents a challenge. So I want to go through a couple of tips that we found successful in helping us do just that create draft and position offers for acceptance. So in a competitive market, what you need to do is make an offer very compelling for a seller. Oftentimes the seller is going to focus most invariably on the price. Money talks generally. That’s the biggest point and factor in your offer. Oftentimes remember, even if you have appraisal, contingencies or mortgage contingency, oftentimes in hot markets, seller markets like we’re in right now across the country, prices over list are still going to appraise and still going to come out.

Price is Key

They’re still arms length transactions. They’re still market driven. We need to counsel and caution our clients to not get too concerned about this. If this is going to be a longer term purchase and an investment for them, realizing that sometimes if you do need to move you have to pay up some times. To secure that property of your dreams that you really want. And we’re seeing that now we’re seeing properties go and trade over list price in markets all over the US in record time. Often many that are put on the market are selling within hours within days, multiple showings, multiple offers immediately.

Counsel, do the CMA homework, understand the neighborhood, understand the comps, understand the trend of the market and then counsel your client accordingly.

Make Clean Offers

The next is going to be making very, very clean offers in terms of less issue, less contingencies as we call it. So if you can waive contingencies like mortgage and go all cash or utilize a credit line against a portfolio. Sellers don’t want to wait around for bank approvals. They don’t want to be subject to the risk surrounding an appraisal, and they want cash now.

So cash offers are really King. If you can get your clients to do that, liquidate other assets, sell another property before they start searching. If you can waive the inspection, which we caution against doing, especially in newer built homes, oftentimes this can be done, with reasonable confidence, or you could even take a contractor with you or a friend with you that knows things about home systems during the showing thats another way to get some peace of mind around the major systems in the home, HVAC, foundation and structural. And any other inspections or contingencies you might have, if there’s a way to leave those out, leave them out, but make sure that you counsel your clients accordingly.

They know the risk, they know the reward and they know what it might do to improve the attractiveness and the positioning of their offer. Remember in a sellers market, buyers have to sacrifice things. Right now we’re in a tight sellers market with a lot of liquidity interest rates have never been lower and offers have never been higher. So we’re seeing cheap debt funnel the market bid up in the pricing, run up in markets across the US. Interest rates as indicated in signaled by the federal reserve are going to remain well extended amount of time.

So, with those rates hovering for 30 year, fixed around 3%, some going below that for primary homes, some just above it for second and third vacation homes, we’re going to see a very, very strong market. So hopefully you get some value from this today. If you did, please drop me a comment, a like, shoot me a message, share this with somebody who would benefit from hearing it, any other real estate agents or brokers out there looking for real estate education, real estate coaching and mentoring.

That’s why I’m here. I’m sharing best practices. What we do in my real estate brokerage team as the number one real estate agent and team in our market and at our company. So again, coming to you live from Lake Champlain, as you can see behind me, sunset, I’m going to go for a walk here before the end of the holiday weekend. Hope you had a great holiday weekend with your family and friends had some downtime, enjoyed it, and again, to your success and happiness, we’ll talk to you next time.

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