Step 8: Make an Offer

You have found the home you love. Great! We will want to put in an offer for you as soon as possible, ideally within a few hours after you have made your decision. In order to submit an offer for you, we will need some key information:

Full Legal Name: We will need the full legal name of every individual who will be on the contract.

Contact Information: We will need the phone number for each individual on the contract, as well as an email address for each individual on the contract.

Offer Price: What price do you want to offer on the home? We will have a discussion about the market and current trends in the neighborhood to prepare you to expect to be either paying under, at, or above list price for that home.

Your Walk Away Price: Be prepared that sellers may not accept your initial offer price as it is usually rare for a seller to do so without some negotiating back and forth. Make the decision of what your walk away price will be and stick with it before things become too heated or emotional.

Closing Date: Typically it takes about 30 to 45 days to close on a property after mutual acceptance. You can sometimes ask for a longer closing date, but in this fast moving market the shorter the close the better. So as an example, if you know you would like to be settled in your new home on June 1st, start putting in offers in the month of April to give the property enough time to close. If you are an all cash buyer you can typically ask for a shorter closing period than 30 days. Typically if you are using financing 30 days is about the minimum closing time.

Earnest Money: How much earnest money are you comfortable with putting down on the property that you have chosen? Generally you want to put what you are willing to risk losing. If you were to default on the contract all you are risking is your earnest money. The more earnest money you put down, the more serious it shows you are to the seller. Once mutual acceptance on the contract is reached you have two days to deposit the earnest money. Your broker will go over with you how you would like the earnest money to be held.

Down Payment: When writing up the offer for you, we will need to know how much money you would like to put down towards the purchase price.

Closing Cost Credits: Do you want to ask for any credits towards closing costs? This would go towards the amount of fees you have to pay at closing including your down payment.

Home Warranty: Would you like the seller to provide a home warranty on the property?

Contingencies: Are there any other contingencies that we need to be aware of? For example: Do you need to sell your current home before purchasing this one?

Now that we have all the information we need, we will begin writing up the offer for you! Most often we will send the completed offer over to your email via a program called Authentisign. It is a super simple process that allows you to sign multiple pages in just a few seconds! Once the offer is signed by you, we will be submitting it to the listing agent. While sometimes negotiations can go quickly, other times it can be 24-72 hours before we hear a response back about if our offer was accepted or not. This could be for a number of different reasons; either the seller is out of town, or they want to think about it for a longer period of time etc. Really there are a lot of different scenarios. Now is where patience is important!