When buying a home, it’s hard to pin down what sellers look for in this market. Most homes are facing multiple offer situations. How can you stand out among other buyers? What can you include in your offer to win your dream home? Does an earnest money deposit matter that much. All this and more below discussed by our founders and Erik Wright. He is the Co-Founder of Social House Group.
Transcription
Erik Wright 0:00
One of my advantages, I guess, being like, predominantly a listing agent is I have a really good idea of like what sellers look at in this market, you know, because that’s who I work with.
Paul Apostolakis 0:08
Let’s talk about that. Actually, let’s talk about that. Eric, what do sellers look for in this market? You know, like when you’ve got 15 offers–over ask. You’ve got appraisal guarantees, you got cash offers, you’ve got all this stuff. And people are writing letters and doing escalation clauses, right? They’re doing everything they can to get these. So you’re getting a lot of good offers. I bet you like on a nice listing, you’re not getting a lot of bad offers, right? They’re gonna be all really competitive because they know they have to be. So how, as a listing agent, Do you look at all these offers– do you automatically go for the highest one? Or do you look for other nuances that people aren’t looking at?
Erik Wright 0:44
So I always look at the most like guaranteed money, right? So the first thing I look at is the appraisal guarantee, you know, if I have a $200,000 listing, and I got an offer for– and I was confident, it was an appraiser around 200k. And I got an offer 250k with no guarantee and an offer for 225k with a 20k guarantee, I’m accepting that 225k offer all day, or at least recommending to my client. And so like appraisal guarantee is always number one, and then you know, free occupancy is another big one just because that’s you know, going to be anywhere from a grand but four grand or more, depending on the price point, of just guaranteed cash because you’re living rent free there for 30 to 60 days. So those are the two biggest things that I look at. And then just like I always ask agents when they write offers on my listings to include something around the inspection, basically just acknowledging that they’re not going to ask for any repairs under “X” amount of dollars. Just to kind of give us some more reassurance. They’re not going to ask for a bunch of BS after the inspection and waste our time. So, those are the those are the three biggest things. I mean, EMD (earnest money deposit) obviously, not one of the biggest weighted things that I look at, at least, just because there’s such a rare occurrence where the seller actually ever retains that, you know, obviously, it’s important to have it be at least a significant amount for the buyer to where they’re not just willing to walk away after 45 days, but I don’t wait that super heavily and kind of all the same to with like downpayment. I mean, yeah, obviously I’d prefer a higher down payment, but if somebody’s putting down 5%, so they can give me a 25k guarantee instead of 20%. Right? I don’t care as long as it’s still a conventional mortgage. You know, at the end of the day, I’m not necessarily discounting a lower down payment just for the sake of that I’m looking at all the terms just to figure out you know, where I think we have the most guaranteed cash.
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