Tips on Evaluating an Offer for Your Santa Fe Home

One of our goals at Santa Fe Real Estate Property is to provide you with valuable insight into Santa Fe and buying or selling your home. Many of these blog articles we write are aimed at providing tips that will help you in your exciting homeowner journey – whether it be buying or selling. Today we are going to talk about evaluating an offer for your Santa Fe home.

Once we have successfully marketed your Santa Fe home, there is a time period where the buyer excitedly waits for your response to his/her offer. It will be incredible if, in evaluating the offer, all the details are exactly as you desired. But most times, evaluating an offer is not simply seeing agreements on everything. That is why the details are crucial. So here are some tips in evaluating an offer. Luckily, when you go through Darlene Streit, you have an educated teammate to help:

Let’s suppose for a minute that the price you were looking for is close enough to cause you to leap for joy. This shows an acknowledgment, on the buyer’s part, that your Santa Fe home value is in line (or better) with other homes in your area, and your net after expenses will hopefully enable you to move on to your next residence (hopefully still in Santa Fe) without financial strain. While evaluating an offer begins with that exciting offer number, it doesn’t end there. There are several other pieces to evaluate, in order to access the level of risk going forward.

The deposit offered is an important consideration when it comes to evaluating your offer. For clarification, sometimes a deposit may also be called “earnest money,” or “pledge.” The deposit will help you determine how confident you are in the offer, especially when it’s backed up by more than wishful thinking. When the amount is higher than the customary minimum, that is usually an indication that the potential buyer is fairly serious about the transaction. Part of evaluating this part of the offer is factoring in how easy it would be for the buyer to “decommit” from the proposed amount along with the true liquidity of the pledge. This is, of course, something we’d help you with as part of your team.

Virtually every serious offer will be contingent on the property’s condition passing inspection. Luckily this is a risk factor that the seller has some control over. Many Santa Fe home sellers get ahead of the process by investing in their own inspection before the home is listed for sale. Last-minute discoveries of maintenance issues that could have been fixed beforehand are likely to tear apart a transaction that had otherwise been going smoothly. If an issue has been properly disclosed in advance, evaluating an offer will include verifying acknowledgment of such disclosures.

An offer may contain several other provisions, so properly evaluating an offer means carefully weighing the practical impact each provision may have. The timing elements can be crucial and are important in an offer consideration. Too lengthy a closing can be inconvenient for you and add a degree of uncertainty to the proposed transaction. “On the other hand too swift a closing may create an interim “no-place-to-live” situation for you and that can be awkward and expensive! An offer that is contingent on the sale of the buyer’s home also presents an amount of uncertainty that needs to be evaluated with knowledge of that area’s specifics. When evaluating an offer, any provision that introduces uncertainty adds to the ultimate risk.

Successfully evaluating an offer – or multiple offers – for your Santa Fe home is often much more than a simple yes or no decision. Creating a strategic counter-offer is often called for and that’s when there’s no substitute for having an experienced Santa Fe real estate agent by your side to help create a win-win counter offer.

To discuss these and the other steps that will result in the successful sale of your Santa Fe home, give me a call to arrange a no-obligation consultation. Darlene Streit – 505.920.8001.