I want to make an offer on this home and what do we do next in Katy TX?

I want to make an offer on this home and what do we do next in Katy TX?

The above is another Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) by many clients. My blog here is the tenth of my blog series concerning FAQ and provides Buyers with a summary outline of the process of making an offer.

I will start will a simple phrase that an oral offer has no legal standing in Texas. I do not know the rules of other States but here all offers have to be in writing to have any legal standing. Per the Statute of Frauds in Texas “A promise or agreement is not enforceable unless the promise or agreement or memorandum of it is in writing. In addition, it has to be signed by the person to be charged with the promise or agreement or by someone lawfully authorized to sign for him or her”.  This is the law in Texas.

An offer for any resale property in the State of Texas requires the preparation of an entire contract with all disclosures, addendums and notices attached. The offer contract is sent to the listing agent/broker and these days the offers are normally communicated via E-mail. I personally have seen (but not recently) faxed offers.

If I am your Realtor I will prepare the offer and make numerous suggestions of what I believe the negotiable items should be including an initial price to offer. We will develop a work in process strategy for dealing with counteroffers and decide what your maximum price point level.  Many clients get very nervous at this stage and flat out say we have no idea how much to offer. No worries at all as this are part of my job. I will go through most of the items we need to negotiate in detail with you and mention what we should do with the lesser important items. I believe there are over 20 items in a normal residential resale contract in Texas which might require negotiation. Our initial objective is get agreement with the seller on as many of these negotiable points as possible and hopefully this gets the list down to no more 2 or 3 items for us to still negotiate with price usually being the final item. The main idea I always try to use in these negotiations is that both sides need to feel good with the transaction. There are thousands of books written about negotiating and the purpose of this blog is to provide buyer with a simple outline of the offer process.  One very important item all buyers will need to figure out is a closing date that will fit with their current living situation of owning, leasing or whatever.

I will need to have a copy of a pre-approval letter from a lending financial institution. Sellers in Texas will not even consider the offer unless the contract I mentioned above is accompanied by this preapproval letter from a lender. When I first speak with potential clients this is one of the first questions I ask. Frankly, if you do not have a pre-approval letter or high confidence that loan approval will be no issue (company relocation) then even beginning the process of viewing available homes is probably jumping the gun.

You as buyer will need to give me two checks. The first is a check made out to the applicable Title Company and it is written for the amount of Earnest Money we have offered. I will provide the name of Title Company and their address. The second check is for the option fee and this check is made out to the seller. I will copy both checks and include these in the package of documents we present to the seller’s agent/broker. These two checks are NOT given to anyone until we have an executed contract. Once you as buyers have signed or initialed all the documents (all parties to the deal have to sign or initial every page of all the documents) I will forward all the information to the seller’s agent/broker and call them so they know an offer is being sent. .

I do not put any deadlines on getting a response to our offer. If time slips away with no response from sellers I will call the other agent/broker to see what is happening. I have run into situations where the principals are on vacation and cannot easily be reached.  If necessary we can at that point in time add a restriction to our offer about a deadline if we believe sellers are not acting in good faith.

The above blog answers the question I want to make an offer on this home and what do we do next in Katy TX? I could write a blog containing numerous pages which covers just the various points we need to negotiate.