What is Wrong With This Sacramento Home Offer?

It is rare to receive a perfect Sacramento home offer.

The way I sell real estate in Sacramento works extremely well for my sellers because I am on the constant look out for what is wrong with this Sacramento home offer. My first instinct, unlike many Sacramento Realtors, is NOT oh, boy, we have an offer, let’s sign it. As in: press hard, third copy is yours. My sellers and I intend to close the transaction. To us, a purchase contract is a legal and binding contract issued in Good Faith. To other agents, though, we can be at opposite ends of the spectrum before ever going into escrow.

Of course, as with any purchase offer, the way it is completed by the buyer’s agent is more than half the battle. First the offer needs to be completed correctly (spelling, math errors, unchecked boxes, blank lines, wrong forms) and much of the time it is not. But that is no surprise and not the primary issue. Those are clerical errors we can fix.

The real issue is the motivation, intentions and qualifications of the buyer. In a hot seller’s market in Sacramento, the most obvious sign in a Sacramento home offer is typically the sales price. Too low or too high can be a red flag, and I never know which we will receive. Digging deeper, we might find, for example, that the buyer has never seen the property. When buyers don’t view properties, it means they might have more concerns and try to renegotiate later.

It can be a kiss of death to remove a home from the market and put it back on market. Sellers lose the momentum of being a brand new listing in a hot, hot Sacramento market. Now the sellers’ home is damaged goods. And why? Because some agent tried to take a short cut and not show the property, and then tried to induce the seller to accept the Sacramento home offer by offering pie in the sky.

There are many other factors that enter into the work of analyzing a Sacramento home offer. The result can be as simple as a buyer offering less to entice a counter offer, which means once the counter is out, another offer is likely to arrive at full-price without the bickering, and the seller will jump on it, and withdraw the counter. Bickering on the front end can lead to bickering in the middle.

This Sacramento Realtor is patient. I wait for what is best for my sellers and advise accordingly. Call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759.