It is no secret Mountain View as well as most of the Silicon Valley
is experiencing multiple offers on homes for sale. While this is great
for sellers, it can be extremely frustrating for buyers, and their
agents. After losing 5-10 homes a buyer will unquestionalbly start to
doubt their agent. They may feel that their agent is doing something
wrong and maybe it is time to find someone else.
Will this work? Maybe, but there are limits to what a
Mountain View real estate agent
can do. A lot of winning an offer is up to the buyer, so maybe you need
to look in the mirror first, before changing your agent.
In a real estate offer the buyer has some control over what happens. Here are some things you should do:
1.
Are you making realistic offers? If a home is listed for $475,000, you
know there are 10 offers, and you offer $470,000, what do you think is
going to happen?
2. You have been pre-approved for $800,000 with
20% down. You only have down payment for 20% of $800,000, so you need to
only offer a price that will make it through an appraisal. However,
most homes are selling for prices higher than they can appraise for, so
what do you do? You will need to find a less expensive home so that you
have a 5-10% reserve of cash over the price where you think the home
will appriase, i.e., you need to find a home where you can put down
25-30%, not 20%, so that when it does not appraise you have the cash to
cover it.
3. The seller has completed a a full disclosure package,
including a property inspection, termite, roof, chimney inspection, and
you ask for a 17 day property contingency period. I am not saying you
should not have your own inspection, but keep the time to a minimum.
4.
You have a pre-approval letter from Happy Birthday Mortgage with
nothing from an underwriter, and nothing from a direct lender. I don't
care if the mortgage broker from Happby Birthday Mortgage is your
mother, it is not going to fly. Get a full approval from a direct
lender. It is hard enough to compete against a cash offer, but to try to
compete with a pre-approval letter that may not be worth the paper it
is written on is no way to act in a competitive market.
5. You are
making an offer on a short sale
and don't offer to open escrow until after bank approval. While that
may be ok in a buyer's market, when there are so few homes for sale, and
so many hopeful buyers, it is not going to work anymore.
So look at yourself first. Tomorrow I will talk about what your agent can do to help your offer win.
Marcy Moyer
Keller Williams Realty
www.marcymoyer.com
marcy@marcymoyer.com
D.R.E. 01191194
