What makes one offer stronger than the next? The answer can be the difference between landing your dream home – or not. Today, we’re going to break down all of the important elements of an offer and how to approach each one.

The first element that comes into play is price. While this might seem like the make-or-break factor, there are a couple of different things we can do to make our offer more attractive to the seller – even if it’s not the highest price of the bunch.

The next is financing. Are you buying the property using cash? Are you putting as little as 5% down? Are you putting 20% down? Depending on the mortgage you’re looking for, it’s going to either reassure the seller or give them a little bit less confidence.

The only thing we can do to prevent feelings of doubt if you’re putting in an offer with 5% is to have a pre-approval! If you’re already pre-approved for the amount that you’re offering, it obviously removes a lot of the uncertainty from the equation.

Next, we’re going to be discussing the inspection: 99% of the time, we’re going to be inspecting the property instead of waiving the inspection. The only exception to that rule is if it’s a general contractor that, at the time of the visits, did an inspection and feels very comfortable with the property based on what they’ve seen.

When it comes to documents, it’s important to get what you need but not go overboard. Which documents do we have to review? What delays do we have to review them? Delays play a big part in the offer and how long things are going to take. At LJ Realties, we usually request taxes, leases, and certificates of location, but if we ask for more than we really need, sellers can get a bit uneasy.

You’ll also need to consider inclusions and exclusions. If the sellers have not outright offered certain things and we start asking for the dining room table, light fixtures, etc, that might create friction. The only time exclusions are really important is when the seller includes a fixture you don’t want – like a murphy bed, for example – so you’ll ask them to exclude it.

The reason for that is because there are costs associated with removing a murphy bed and getting it out of the room. The seller usually includes things like this because they don’t want to deal with it themselves, so if you ask for them to exclude it, you’ll have to take that into consideration on the offer.

Next, we’re looking at the notary and occupancy date. These two dates usually happen 2 to 7 days apart from each other. We usually go to the notary and take occupancy right away – however, in certain instances, the seller already knows where they’re going to move, and they may not get their new place for a more significant amount of time after the notary date.

Therefore, in the MLS description, they’ll state that they only want to give occupancy on a certain date. If we can respect that date, it’s going to make our offer a lot stronger.

Moving on to general conditions: at the end of our offer, we have a section where we can include additional conditions, whether that’s requesting a new certificate of location, requesting several visits afterwards, or anything else in between.

In a hot market like this, it’s important to put together a well-crafted offer! If you need help, we’re here to guide you: reach out to our team today and we’ll tackle this key step together.