One Way to Decrease Chance of Escrow Cancellation

Dealing with an escrow cancellation is less painful when you have a backup buyer.

You know, I can write about trying to avoid an annoying escrow cancellation until I am blue in the face, and it doesn’t change anything in Sacramento real estate. Part of the problem is we’ve got such a huge number of Realtors in Sacramento who do very little business, so they don’t always fully counsel their buyers. When I tell consumers that about 90% of the agents sell 3 or 4 homes a year, they are flabbergasted. How effective can an agent be when she closes so few sales?

I’m not knocking agents who don’t want to be top producers, btw. Not everybody chases the business nor finds challenges exciting and rewarding. Lots of real estate agents lead normal lives. But not me. And I have been trying to figure out how to avoid an escrow cancellation ever since they started happening in such huge proportions. When I have to resell what seems like half of my listings a second time, there is something seriously wrong.

Our limited inventory drives buyers and their agents nuts, I get it. They don’t like multiple offers and feel like they will always lose out, even when that is silly. There are tons of ways to beat that issue and win. Sometimes buyers get fed up so they write many offers on many homes when they can’t buy them all. Agents who encourage this crap should be strung up by their toes, dipped in honey and left to rot in a tree of wild bees.

Now when my sellers and I review offers, we’re looking for the offer we want to close, and we’re also looking for the buyer we would like to place in a backup offer. Rather than sell the home twice after the first offer sends an escrow cancellation, we’re taking out an insurance policy. I’ve been filling out the back-up offer addendum along with a counter and sending it to the buyer we would like to sell to if it wasn’t for the somewhat better offer we accepted.

I make it easy for the buyer to say OK. Sure, I’ll go into backup.

Sometimes the differences between those two offers are really slight. They could even be the same sales price. Why just the other day, in that very situation, the original set of buyers delivered an escrow cancellation the first day into escrow. That listing never went back on the market. The backup buyers moved into primary position and replaced the first buyers.

If you’re hoping to sell a home in Sacramento, call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759. Why not put 40 years of experience to work for you? I’m always working to find ways to improve my client’s experiences.