CHAPTER 5 Buying a House: Negotiation Dos and Don'ts
You visited dozens of open houses and met with builders and sellers. You looked for the ideal neighborhood and searched for the best available offers. Now, you’ve finally found a property you would like to call “home” and are willing and able to pay for. Welcome to the most important and challenging part of the home-buying process: the price negotiations.
HOW TO MAKE YOUR FIRST OFFER THE BEST OFFER
Making your first offer is an important step that needs a significant amount of preparation and analysis. Go in knowledgeable, with consideration of all the components of your price offer, when submitting the proposal to the seller. You are not so much responding to their listing price as using your own factors in arriving at your offer. The two aren’t necessarily related. An important component is a Comparative Market Analysis (CMA), which your real estate agent can provide — another benefit of working with a buyer’s agent — and is a mathematical model to find out the value of your future home. It calculates the basic conditions, such as number of bedrooms, bathrooms, existence/size of the yard, or swimming pool. Then, it compares your potential home to similar houses on the market in your area. This model will give you an idea of the average local cost, which will be fundamental information to inform your offer. 31
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