David Bruce

March 25th, 2009

How To Make A Real Estate Offer

You’ve visited Bon Air, Ginter Park, Mechanicsville, Varina, Midlothian, Short Pump, the Fan and scores of other Richmond area neighborhoods looking for the that perfect home. After months of searching you finally found the home of your dreams.  Now what? The next step in the process is to write an offer. How? It’s not as easy as it sounds. Your offer is the first step toward negotiating a sales contract with the seller. Since this is just the beginning of negotiations, you should put yourself in the seller’s place and imagine their reaction to everything you include in your offer. Your goal is to get what you want, and imagining the seller’s reactions will help you attain that goal.

Writing an offer is much more complicated than just coming up with a price. Both buyers and sellers want to build in protections and contingencies to protect their investment and limit their risk. In an offer, you include not only the price you are willing to pay, but other important details of the purchase as well. This includes how you intend to finance the home, your down payment, who pays what closing costs, what inspections are performed, timetables, whether personal property (window treatments, play structures etc) is included in the purchase , terms of cancellation, any repairs you want performed, which professional services will be used and when you get physical possession of the property.

Even if you have visited the property multiple times, the seller has years of knowledge about their home and there could be some things you want to find out about as quickly as possible. For this reason, you will require certain disclosures as part of your offer. In brief, you should require the seller to disclose any conditions that may have a substantial impact on your decision to purchase the home. When you take possession of your new home the last thing you want is to find major problems with the property.  You should make it clear in your offer that certain minimum standards are required.

Buying a home is a major investment for both the buyer and seller. However, it is more important than just the purchase price. You should take the time to review and follow proven advice to write a successful offer.  Don’t go it alone!  Contact Skye Bruce Properties, the Official REALTOR and Buyer’s Agents of RichmondHomeShopper.com. Skye Bruce, the #1 RE/MAX Agent in Central Virginia in 2006, 2007 and 2008 has a team of expert Buyer’s Agents to help you through this process.

Want to learn more about the home buying process?  Check out our page dedicated to helping you understand the home buying process!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 4:44 pm and is filed under Buying A Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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