Let’s discuss the elephant in the room. Home Sale Contingencies.
When a buyer needs to sell their home in order to purchase a new one, a home sale contingency is added to the contract. We’re seeing a large percentage of offers from Buyers with these. What’s often surprising is that other real estate agents aren’t asking the questions needed to protect their clients in these offer scenarios.
Let us give you a few examples for the context of recent scenarios in the past month we have seen:
Scenario #1 – I don’t need to sell my home to purchase.
The buyer tells their agent they don’t need to sell their home to purchase, but the lender absolutely needs this to be a requirement. The agent doesn’t call the lender to verify the information and they make an offer on a home without a home sale contingency. The buyer’s home that they have to sell falls through and they aren’t protected with their earnest money or deposit on their other home. Ouch. With just a few simple calls and questions, that agent could have represented their client so much better. – we see this one all the time with other agents
Scenario #2 – How many homes have to sell so that I can sell mine?
Our seller receives an offer with a home sale contingency in the offer. The buyer has to sell their home in order to purchase. We ask for a copy of the contract on the other home. We also ask if the buyer purchasing their home has to sell in order to purchase. As a matter of fact, they do. Interesting.
So, now we have a double home sale contingency – home #1 has to sell – to purchase home #2 which has to sell – to purchase home #3. Does any other agent have a copy of the first home sale contract? Nope.
Well, not only do we want to see a copy of all contracts leading up to ours, we want to call and interview all lenders and agents associated with the contract. This allowed us to negotiate a better position for our client and protect them in the home sale. Without asking these questions, we can’t protect our clients. If one of the three sales didn’t go through, our seller would be left holding the bag for everyone.
There were 3 other agents involved in this transaction outside of our team, not one of them tried to coordinate to protect everyone involved.
That’s why we love having a team that can work and collaborate together to make the home sale a positive and successful experience for all. This is also why we love sitting down for a simple 20-30 minutes to discuss the home buying and selling process.
A little education shared from our 2,500+ home sales goes a long way towards saving our clients time, stress and money.
Happy Selling,
Seychelle & team
