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Make An Offer And Negotiate With The Seller
Now that you’ve found the home you’d like to buy, it’s time to make an offer. Your local real estate association,
The Perfect Pad...
working with legal counsel, has developed the contracts that are used for transactions. Here in Caifornia, the California Association of REALTOR®s rewrites and updates these contracts every couple of years – editing to eliminate any ambiguitities that may have led to misunderstandings or lawsuits. They not only enable you to specify a sale price but they include many clauses for specifying various terms of the purchase, such as the closing and possession dates, your deposit amount, time periods for inspections or acquiring a loan, etc, and other conditions. You should carefully review these clauses with your REALTOR® to ensure you understand the subtle nuances of the contract and to make sure they express the ideal terms for your offer.
In addition to drawing up the contact for you, your REALTOR® should address all your questions about the offer process. Take advantage on their knowledge and expertise and make sure you take the time to go over it carefully and understand the process fully. It surprises me how many people do not make this a priority…
Once you’ve written the offer, your REALTOR® will present it to the seller and the seller’s representative. This is ideally done in person, so your agent can “pitch” it to them, advocating on your behalf and making a case for you as a stong and viable buyer. At that point, the process depends largely on the market you’re in, the needs and priorities of both you and the seller, and the negotiating skills of the agents on both sides. The seller can accept your offer, reject it, or counter it to initiate the negotiation process. Successive counter-offers, with deadlines for responding and meeting conditions, will be exchanged between you and the seller until a mutually-satisfactory agreement is reached or the negotiations reach a dead end.
Negotiations can involve many factors, many of which will be discussed in greater detail in a later post Negotiating The Deal on a Home Purchase, to follow soon.
Read previous installments of this series here:
The home buying process – Overview
The home buying process – Step 1: Define, Research, Plan
The home buying process – Step 2: Find a Realtor
The home buying process – Step 3: Pick a Lender and Get PreApproved
