JUST SOLD! Classic Craftsman Era Home
Published On: August 30, 2017 Posted by: Jeremy Peterson
We just closed on the sale of this property located at 3051 Porter Ave. We originally listed this 3 bed 2 bath home on June 13th for $144,900. We immediately received 5 offers. We did a round of highest and best offers and accepted the highest offer. Unfortunately, the buyers backed out two days later after their family walked through the property. It appears the offer had been partly blind. So, we went to our next offer who was excited to move forward. We put the home under contract again. The second buyer also backed out.
At this point we became very frustrated with the fickleness of the market. We placed the home on the market again and solicited new offers. We received an offer for $146,500 from a first time homebuyer using a Utah Housing Loan. The buyer asked for $4300 in closing costs. We accepted the offer.
About a week after the due diligence deadline, the agent (a newbie), sent a request for repairs to the property. I explained to him that he didn’t have a very strong negotiating position given the tardiness of the request. The agent suggested his client would like $2,000 in additional closing cost assistance in lieu of the repairs. Since his loan followed FHA standards, I suggested that we wait until the appraisal was done so we can identify all the repairs that were required and go from there. The appraisal was scheduled several days out.
Several days later I received a call from the appraiser saying his appraisal order had been cancelled by the lender. I called the buyer’s agent who was not aware of the situation. I called the lender and we found out that the buyer had a long laundry list of underwriting conditions to satisfy. The lender was requiring him to have a specific level of reserves in his bank account which would take two weeks to obtain. At this point, it became apparent that this buyer was under qualified. Our options were to put the property back on the market, or cross our fingers and hope the buyer could pull off getting his loan done.
Ultimately, we hedged our bets by advertising the property for sale while closely monitoring the buyer’s progress on his conditions checklist. Fortunately, he was able to perform. The appraisal came back clean with no required repairs. Yet, the buyer’s agent came back to us a week before closing to ask for more closing cost concessions. I again reminded him that his negotiating position was very weak. I correlated with the lender to confirm the necessity of the request and she confirmed the need for the additional concessions. When I inquired why the request for concessions had not been made with the initial offer, she didn’t have a good answer. My hunch is that the agent was hoping to get the offer accepted with the lower concessions and then leverage repairs to get more. When that didn’t happen, they were left flat footed.
The moral of the story is that in an extremely strong seller’s market, buyers and their agents are resorting to interesting tactics to get their offers considered and accepted. In this case, the time investment the seller made in the buyer kept us at the table. Otherwise, we would have disengaged early on and found a more qualified buyer.
So, congratulations to our sellers on finally closing! If you are thinking of selling your home and want to know what it is worth, CONTACT ME, and let’s schedule a time to walk through your property.