Why does your REALTOR® advise you to offer a fair price? Why does he request a quick turnaround time for the offer approval?
- Until the seller accepts your offer, he or she can continue to review and accept other offers.
- The quicker you get your offer approved, the less chance that another buyer will get the property.
During this negotiating process, until all parties finalize the contract, the seller can and will continue to accept other offers.
Now you are in the negotiating process. While the buyer and seller are negotiating, the contract is still open. In other words, the contract is not completely final. The purchase offer is in limbo. Until both the buyer and seller finalize and agree upon the contract in writing, the seller can continue to accept other offers, and probably will continue to receive offers from buyers. During the negotiation process, if the seller receives a better offer from another buyer, he or she may decide to take that offer.
If the seller gets an offer better than yours, he may take the other offer instead.
It is important to offer your highest price and best terms in your initial purchase offer. When you offer your best price up front, and you do not request too many concessions, the seller will be inclined to accept your offer right away without a counter offer. This puts you in the best position of securing your purchase immediately, and then the seller cannot back out, change his mind or accept another offer.
That is why it is important to offer a fair price and request quick turnaround times for contract approvals.
Your agent will request a quick turnaround time for the seller to respond to your offer. Although the standard time for a response in California is 3 days for an offer, I often request a turnaround time of only 1 day on my buyers’ offers. This strategy does not give the seller a lot of time to receive and review offers from other buyers, which is exactly our plan!
Read more in our book, "Buy Your First Home", http://tinyurl.com/dy2wjx4.
