such that personalities and emotions do not become involved. Price negotiations take a special skill and understanding of the psychology of offering and counter-offering. Skilled agents keep the transaction dispassionate and rational. For example, a buyer (you) might like a home but despise its wood-paneled walls, shag carpet, and lurid orange kitchen. When you work with an agent, you can express your opinions on the current owner’s decorating skills and complain about how much it will cost to upgrade the home without insulting the owner. Your agent will translate that to the seller — that you very much like the property but can see having to spend a certain amount in decorating costs, and thus the reason the offer is maybe lower than the seller was hoping for. We all look through different lenses when we make big decisions which affect how we determine value. Agents are able to navigate that and help both buyers and sellers remove the lenses to a degree.
CONTRACTUALLY SPEAKING…
There are contracts and documents involved in purchasing a house. The stack can be daunting. Unless you’re a real estate lawyer, mortgage broker, or highly experienced at Real Estate these documents will be foreign to you, yet they require detailed and accurate completions. Buying a property is not necessarily a “fill-in-the-blanks” transaction. One mistake, let’s say in the legal description, could create an non enforceable contract. A few years ago I sold a property to some buyers moving from Fort McMurray to Calgary. The home backed onto a school which was a very important feature for the buyers as they had children that would attend the school. To our surprise the seller announced one week before possession that they had changed their mind and no longer wished to sell the property. This was devastating news to the buyers as they really wanted that home.
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