How Can You Find a Home in Today's Market?

If you’ve been in the market for a house, it’s important to know where to look. Today, I’ve got three strategies that we use to help our clients find their next home.

 Thinking of selling? Get a free home valuation

 Thinking of buying a home? Search all homes for sale on the MLS

In this low-inventory market, how can you find a home? Today, I’ve got three strategies that will help you achieve just that. These strategies are ones we use personally to help our clients. In fact, this year we’ve helped three different buyers find homes that hadn’t even hit the market.

Before I talk about those strategies, though, it’s important to note another component that will be key to your success: having a refined search in place. During your home search, you should narrow the homes you’re looking at by deciding what neighborhoods you’re interested in and what criteria is important to you in a property. 

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Finding the right home is all about knowing where to look.

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Once you’ve got a more narrow idea of what you’re looking for, we can implement the following three strategies.

1. Utilize agent relationships. We have access to different portals, groups, and agents who are promoting “coming soon” listings or pocket listings. On our team, we utilize our relationships with various agents in order to dig up listings that not everyone knows about. 
2. Engage in outbound prospecting. This is something we do a lot of. If you know where you’re interested in living, we have systems and tools that allow us to extract information from that specific neighborhood. Whether it is by calling or going door to door, we know the most effective ways to gather leads on inventory for our clients.
3. Search our database of expired or withdrawn listings. We have data going back about five years from listings that have expired or been withdrawn from the market. Using this data, we can call those sellers and inquire about their properties. By finding out whether they are still considering selling, we are able to find homes for our clients that not everyone on the market has already seen.

When you are looking to buy a house, having access to all of the inventory available will make a world of difference. Finding the right home is all about knowing where to look.

If you have any other questions or would like more information, feel free to give me a call or send me an email. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

How to Buy and Sell Simultaneously

There are a few different ways you can buy and sell at the same time. Here are the strategies that work best in our current market.

 Thinking of selling? Get a free home valuation

 Thinking of buying a home? Search all homes for sale on the MLS

This is a really hot topic in our market because of our low inventory. With so few options to choose from, sellers know that their home will sell quickly, but they don’t know how quickly they will be able to buy. Nobody wants to end up without a place to live. There are two strategies that we have found to be the best options for tackling this problem.

The first is writing a contingency into your sale contract that you need to find your new property before the deal is finalized. This means that the buyer will agree to the purchase terms, but still give you a specific amount of time to find a home in, usually around three weeks. If you still haven’t found a new home after that time, you can try to have the seller give you more time. They could also choose to terminate the agreement at that point.

The advantage that sellers have in this market is that buyers have been more flexible. We have been able to negotiate that contingency up front to ensure our buyers are never left without options.

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It’s not impossible to juggle buying and selling.

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Another thing we can do is negotiate a rent-back. This is where we’ll close on the home sale, then the buyer will allow you to rent the home back from them until you find a new home. It frees you from having to deal with temporary living or storage. It’s an option that has become more and more popular in this strong seller’s market.

If you or someone you know is in a similar situation and needs the guidance of a professional, give us a call or send us an email. Hope to hear from you soon!

Tips for Winning a Multiple Offer Situation as a Buyer

If you find yourself in a multiple offer situation as a buyer, there are a few ways you can ensure that your offer comes out on top.

 Thinking of selling? Get a free home valuation

 Thinking of buying a home? Search all homes for sale on the MLS

If you’re on the hunt for a home in this market, it can be tough. There isn’t a lot of inventory available and there is a lot of competition from other buyers in many price points. How can you make sure your offer percolates to the top in a multiple offer situation?

The first thing you can do—which is something our team specializes in—is work with your agent to reach out to the seller’s agent and ask them what’s so important to their client about selling their house. The reason for this is you want to match your offer to the motivation of the seller. Sometimes they want to sell the house as fast as possible; sometimes they need a 60-day rent-back agreement after it sells. If you don’t have that communication to understand what’s important to the seller, you won’t be able to position your offer accordingly. 

The first thing you want is for your agent to reach out to the buyers' agents and ask for their clients' highest and best offers. You want to let them know that it might be their final chance to put their best foot forward.

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Match your offer to the motivations of the seller.

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Next, incorporate a letter to the seller and send it to them. This means writing a personal, heartfelt letter further expressing your interest and why you see yourself living there. We’ve been able to get many clients’ offers accepted that were priced below the competition based on these kinds of letters. 

On our team, another thing we like to do is focus on agent relationships. We have a strong reputation for working hard for our clients. We negotiate on your behalf and make sure we’re doing everything that we agreed to do up front. This way other agents in our market know we perform our tasks and duties and do our job and it makes them more comfortable accepting your offer and moving forward with us. 

Finally, ask yourself—what is the most you’re willing to pay? If your offer doesn’t get accepted, you don’t want to be kicking yourself the next day knowing that you would’ve been willing to offer more. At the same time, you want to make an offer that won’t make you feel like you overpaid if it did get accepted. Everyone has their sweet spot, so that’s up to you to determine. A lot of times, you only get one shot though. 

If you have any questions about how to win a multiple offer situation as a buyer in our market, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I would be happy to help.