Right now in San Jose (and Silicon Valley generally), entry level single family homes are selling very briskly. In many cases, sellers are getting multiple offers when they put their clean, updated home on the market with an appropriate price & good marketing.

I work with both buyers and sellers, and can show you what will help your position and what will hurt it if you are writing an offer in a “multiple offer” situation. This will be the first in a series (I can’t put it all into one post) of tips on how to write a more compelling offer when you’re up against other buyers.

Purchase agreements are all about price & terms. Usually price is the main factor, but sometimes the terms can really throw the balance one way or the other. Often by providing better terms, you can nose out the competition.  Or conversely, if a couple of offers are close to each other generally, but your terms are worse, your “position” will suffer for it.

What are “terms”?  They’re the “everything else” of the offer. Things like:

• initial deposit (amount/percent of offer price)
• as is (or do you ask for repairs?)
• number & length of contingencies
• documentation  (preapproval letter at a minimum)
• length of escrow, seller move-out timeframe
• who pays for what

Once I heard of  buyers who wrote in as a term of the offer that the sellers’ dog would stay with the property.  The sellers were so outraged that they refused to sell their house to those buyers at any price.

These are just a few of the terms found in an offer – aside from price, these may be the most important terms for your offer. If you mess up on some or all of these, your contract will be given less consideration by the seller.

Got great terms? That’s awesome. But don’t get too cocky – at the end of the day, the seller does still want fair market value. So for instance, if you have “all cash” and can close fast, that is great and most sellers will want to work with you. But they won’t take an enormous discount for it. If a home’s worth a million dollars and there are several offers at one million dollars (or close to it), that seller will probably not take an offer of $900,000, even if it is “all cash”. If the seller is in a big hurry, he or she might take $950,000 or $980,000. Most of all, it will make your bid the preferred one. But in most cases, the seller won’t take a 10 or 20% discount for all cash.  So get an appropriate understanding of the power of good terms, neither underestimating nor overestimating them.  Often, truly excellent terms may be “worth” 1 – 5% to a seller, depending on what kind of terms are involved. Each situation varies, of course.

Next post on this topic: a list of financing terms (questions I ask my buyers prior to drafting an offer with them) and a discussion of the initial deposit, increase of deposit, and related concepts of liquidated damages and defaults.

Tags: multiple offers, purchase agreements, writing a competitive offer

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 9:40 am and is filed under Buying Tips, Finance Information, First time homebuyers, Multiple Offers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.