What is the Best Way to Negotiate Your Home’s Sale?

Selling your home is a huge decision, especially if you’ve spent many years paying your mortgage in order to use the proceeds from the sale as your nest egg, retirement, or next down payment. You don’t want to undercut yourself, but you also don’t want to be too greedy and lose a reasonable sale offer. Here is how you should handle negotiations.

Price Isn’t The Only Consideration

First of all, the price set to your home isn’t the only detail to consider. The purchase contract and other terms and conditions might make it too difficult, even if the price is fair. For example, some contingencies leave so many loopholes that the deal collapses, like contingencies that link the escrow closing date to the buyer’s sale of their current home.

Become Familiar With the Current Market

The country’s home buying and selling market has fluctuated in the last few decades, to put it lightly. Each city and town in each state has its own specific market trends, and you need to understand your own before you sell. If the selling market is slow, you might be wise to make your decision differently than if the market is hot and unstoppable. Just be sure that the offer you accept keeps you in escrow less than 30 days, and make a counteroffer if you don’t think a buyer’s first offer is fair. That first offer is hardly ever the buyer’s absolute highest price, and this back and forth negotiation is an expected element of home buying and selling.

Look At Buyer’s Financial Situation

Each buyer that you consider for your home will come with certain financial baggage. Is your buyer pre-approved for the cost you are asking? How much of a loan is the buyer seeking from the bank? It’s important to know these factors, since lenders aren’t quick to finance buyers who put down less than 10 percent in a slow market with a purchase price higher than the nearest comparable sale. By looking into this ahead of time, you can save yourself the heartache of finding the “perfect” buyer only to learn that the buyer can’t obtain financing for the loan.