Charlotte Home Buyers Guide, Step 5 – Making the Offer
We’re down to the wire now! You’ve narrowed down the details of your Charlotte home search, found your Realtor®, chosen your lender and now found your new Charlotte dream home. What’s next? Making an Offer on that property and negotiating with the seller. Frankly, this is not exciting reading but, this is where your Realtor® is worth his or her weight in gold! Ask questions with regards to the Offer and be certain that your agent has fully explained the terms of your Offer BEFORE presenting it to the other party.
Your local Charlotte and North Carolina real estate association, working hand-in-hand with legal counsel, have developed the real estate Contracts that are used for transactions in our area. These contracts enable you to specify a sale price and also include many clauses for specifying various terms of purchase, such as the due diligence fee and timeline, the escrow deposit amount, the Closing and possession dates, as well as many other conditions. Your Realtor® will carefully review these clauses with you to ensure that they express your desired Offer and conditions.
In addition to drawing up the Contract, addenda necessary, homes owners’ association reviews and reviewing the property disclosure with you, your Realtor® will be able to address all your questions about the entire Offer process.
Once written and signed, your Realtor® will present the Offer to the seller’s representative. At that point the seller can either accept your Offer, reject it, or counter it to initiate the negotiation process.
Successive counter-offers, with deadlines for responding and meeting conditions, will be exchanged between you and the seller until a mutually agreed upon pending agreement is reached or the negotiations cease.
Bear in mind that if you are competing with other buyers during your negotiations, each time that you counter, the sellers’ previous counteroffer is no longer in effect; you’re basically beginning the Offer process all over. Should the seller have more than your Offer on the table, this frees them up to reach out to other potential buyers and counter their Offers.
Negotiations can involve many factors relating to market conditions, time on the market, whether or not the property is a distressed property and what sellers feel is a fair market value. If your Offer is a clean Offer, meaning that if you are not asking for the moon–excessive Closing costs to be paid, personal items to remain in the home or a conditional Offer based upon the sale or Closing of your current home, chances are you’ll be able to reach an agreement in a timely fashion.