Components of a good offer | Making an offer on a home

Today I’m going to talk about the components of a good offer. So what are some things that you need to present a good offer? There’s a few things. Number one do you have a contingency? Do you know what contingencies are? If you’d like to know a little bit more about contingencies you can watch the video right up there. If you have a contingency you should know that that does reduce your negotiating power. If you have if a seller who has two offers, a contingent offer and a non contingent offer, the non contingent offer most usually looks better than the contingent offer. A non contingent offer is the best in having negotiating power for your offer.

Earnest money in Illinois, in our market on average, we’re about one percent of the purchase price. If you are in a multiple offer situation I highly recommend you go to two or three percent of the purchase price for your earnest money to make your offer seem more serious and to make the seller realize that you are very serious about purchasing their home.

Number three, closing date. There’s a few tricky pieces to determining closing dates. Sometimes a seller does not want to move really quickly. So I get a lot of buyers who say tell them we will close in two weeks. Okay but if we just went through the house and there’s not one box to be found, nothing has been packed up, two weeks might be way too soon for the seller to be able to get out of that house. So it’s very important that when you’re going through the house you take note have they started packing yet, are they ready to go? If there’s a million boxes in the garage and they have already started to pack up, two weeks might be okay. But we don’t want to present an offer and give a short closing time when we know the seller can’t do it. So pay attention to that when you’re in the house and hopefully your Realtor is looking at that too. So closing date can be a positive or a negative.

Now you have to make sure that you are checking with your lender how quickly can they close the loan. Do you have a conventional loan, or do you have an FHA loan? What type of loan do you have?