Whether you are selling the home yourself or you have an agent on your side, there are some simple steps you can take to find and vet potential buyers for your home. Here are some quick tips from Houston home buyers, Offer Climb, on finding the right buyer for your house.
Tip 1:
Avoid open houses. This is a time-honored tradition that lets just anyone walk through your home and keeps you constantly cleaning and on your toes. Honestly, this tradition is outdated and a good realtor will not let you do it. Instead, your sign will state “by appointment”.
Think about it: How many people do you know who were out getting milk from the store, saw a sign for an open house, and then though, “We needed this exact house. How convenient”?
The answer is no one. No one does this. So list your home and show it by appointment. There are plenty of places to list it so that investors and individual buyers alike can see it.
Tip 2:
Once you find interested people, check that they can legitimately afford what you are offering. As the market fluctuates up and down, some less than ethical professionals might tell a buyer that they can “absolutely” afford a higher price—even if they can’t. These same less than ethical professionals convince first-time buyers that after buying your home, they can put in some limited elbow grease, replace a drawer handle here or there, and then sell it at a huge profit (more than the higher price they put down).
Now, ethical considerations aside, the problem here, as the person selling the home, is that real estate transactions will fall out of escrow all the time in such cases. You do not want to take your home off the market only to have the bottom fall out on the deal because the buyer legitimately could not afford the higher price but was under pressure from their agent. Of course this is not the only reason plans fall through, but the outcome is still the same: deals fall apart because their mortgage lender doesn’t approve the amount.
How do you avoid this?
Ask to see a pre-qualification letter from the buyer’s mortgage lender. Ask for their contract. If they are paying in cash, ask for a recent proof of funds.
Tip 3:
Ask if they read everything. In today’s world, a lot of people get loads of official-looking papers in their mailbox, whether they are bank statements that include terms of service at the end of every monthly statement, random junk mail trying to give a new credit card, or your home inspection or appraisal notes. That said, with so much mail, it is easy for people to glance over what they think are the key points, and then ignore the rest. This is a problem if, for example, your home needs some work and you have had said work appraised prior to listing it. The potential buyer might be hasty in their excitement to get a new home, skim your report, and miss the fact that the price was lowered because of the repairs. They might not be able to afford those repairs.
You do not want to get two weeks into the sale only to have your buyer bail, their loan fall through, or have them demand a lower price because they feel cheated (all because they didn’t read everything).
By following these three tips, you can find the right buyers without wasting your time or theirs.
