Truth or Consequences in the Home Buying and Selling Process

Consequences of Decisions When Buying and Selling a Home

It’s always a shame when negotiations don’t result in a sale.  After all, you have a seller that wants to sell a home and by all appearances, a buyer interested in buying said home.  One would think that those offers would or could always result in a contract.  Needless to say, some things just get in the way.  More than anything else, I’d say that the following examples cause more lost transactions than anything else.

Pricing based on the seller’s need rather than based on the home’s value
What happens here is that the buyer may submit an offer at market value which falls well below the seller’s needed price.  In a contentious moment, the seller may be furious and offended.  This is a situation that perhaps could never result in a contract unless the seller faces the conclusion that the need has nothing to do with value.

Buyer submits an offer that is grossly under market value.
Again seller may take offense, but the offer in hand is better than none at all.  I think that sellers should resist this apparent new trend of their agent’s advice to  ”not accepting an offer and suggesting that buyer submit a new offer.” In my little, itty bitty mind, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.  Sure I wish that buyers would just come right or don’t come at all, but I certainly if I were a seller, I wouldn’t want to risk loosing a perfectly good buyer due to a condescending jesture as requesting a new offer.  Why wouldn’t a seller just counter the darned offer?  If you can help me to make sense of this strategy, I’m listening.

Both parties refuse to accept the reality of the situation
The one that really suffers the most is the seller because their home will continue to languish on the market.  The buyer on the other hand (after loosing out on a number of homes) will finally come to the conclusion that s/he’d better wise up and make offers that had a great chance of being accepted.  Eventually they’ll be a homeowner.  But the seller……well if reality never sets in, they’ll just continue to pretend that their home is for sale.

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