How to Determine if the Offer is a Solid Purchase Offer

All viable offers look like a solid purchase offer to a Sacramento Realtor.

First off, a Sacramento Realtor cannot predict a solid purchase offer. No way, no how. Yet that does not stop eager buyer’s agents from calling about pending sales to ask: how firm is that purchase offer? It’s not a question I can really answer. Do I know the buyer personally? No, I do not. Do I represent the buyer? No, I do not. Much of the time, I don’t know the buyer’s agent, either. We have 5,000 agents in our Board. Turnover is high. Many agents aren’t in the business long enough to renew their licenses, which is at the four-year mark.

On top of this, the buyer’s agent might not know the buyer, either. The buyer could be some dude who plucked an agent out of the blue because the agent advertised on a website that contains property listings, like Zillow, for example. Strangers working with strangers working with strangers . . ..

Basically, we have two types of purchase offers. The kind that close and the kind that do not. Both of these look exactly identical to each other. They each contain a strong preapproval letter, and the buyers have coughed up an earnest money deposit by wiring or writing a check to escrow. They have scratched a signature on an offer and are contractually bound.

Which is a solid purchase offer?

You won’t know until closing.

In our hot 2017 real estate market in Sacramento, most of the obviously flakey buyers do not make it into escrow. Given a choice between a badly written purchase offer, submitted without a preapproval letter and an offer that adheres to standards, sellers will take the offer that meets requirements and ignore the screwed up messes.

We received 9 offers the other day for a property and only 7 were viable. Of the 7, most likely one of those might not close. Is it our present escrow or is it one of the offers we did not accept? There is no way to discern. After 40+ years in the real estate business, I can spot a crummy offer a mile away, but I cannot determine which viable offer is a solid purchase offer. It is impossible.

I don’t care if the buyer’s agent promises us the moon. They can say their buyer strolled by this home every day as a child and fell in love, dreaming about the day it would be available for sale; implying they would give up their first born to buy this home, and they can cling to the mailbox, refusing to budge until closing, proclaiming their love by screaming into a forhorn for all the neighbors to hear, and I don’t care.

It doesn’t mean they will close escrow.

If your buyer wants to write a backup offer, just do it. But please don’t call me to ask if we have a solid purchase offer.