What Not to Do When Buying a Home in a Seller's Market

It goes without fail. If I want to see more action than I ever hoped for all I need to do is go out of town. It's like I kick-started the offer stream for my Sacramento short sales and opened the door for short sale approval letters as well. 24 hours. That's all I was gone. 24 hours and the offers rolled in. Plus, I received 3 short sale approval letters. What are bank negotiators doing working on a Friday night? It's not like they have Mondays off because they're all crawling around my email inbox this morning.

I felt a lot of empathy for the buyers whose agents wrote offers over the weekend. It's tough buying a home in a seller's market. Especially in Sacramento. As a Sacramento short sale agent, I help my sellers choose which offer to accept. To them, it's nothing but a pile of paperwork in their inbox. They look at the sales price but when all of the sales prices are identical, how do you choose an offer?

This is the thing that buyer's agents sometimes overlook. They can be so focused on their job, on submitting that short sale offer with all of the right documents that they forget about the receiving end. Buyers and their agents don't always think about the seller or the listing agent. They don't stop to consider how their offer will be received.

But they should.

When you have 7 offers sitting in front of you as a seller, which do you take? I know I have a hard time. For me, they all look like blond surfer guys. Strong muscles. White sparkly teeth. Shiny, polished surfboards. Which one of them do you take home? Then, over in the corner, I spot the guy with the glasses and iPad. He looks like Javier Bardem. Yeah, you'll take that one and pad Thai takeout.

Sometimes, it's not what you don't say, it's what you say. If every single offer looks the same, why would a seller accept an offer that puts restraints on the seller or establishes unreasonable expectations? Especially if the sentence the buyer's agent inserted into the purchase contract was already contained in the contract. If you're asking a seller to do something that the contract already stipulates the seller must do, that can be a little disturbing. In fact, it might appear like you don't trust the seller to perform. Does the seller want to go into escrow with a buyer like that?

Probably not.

A buyer that looks like trouble on the front end will probably be trouble on the back end. It's the logical conclusion to draw. We're looking for that no-problem buyer.