Did I ever tell you about the time that I got 30 offers on a property? I’m sure I didn’t because it just happened this February! I had over 140 scheduled showings in the week the property was on the market and sent out over 80 disclosure packets. It was insane and in my 17 years of real estate, I’ve never had such a massive response to a listing. COVID has wrought real estate madness over the past few years, but this was on a completely different level of insanity.
What made this property so special? The low price was very attractive and it was appropriately marketed as a ‘diamond in the rough’. Buyers love that kind of house, it’s something they can get into with a little less money and put some work into to raise the value. Buyers came from as far as east as Sacramento, and as far south as the South Bay, to checkout this opportunity and we received several all-cash offers. All cash is great, but the majority of offers we received had loans. Some people needed loans but had no financing contingencies. Even better were the offers with no financing and inspection contingencies!
There were a few love letters written to my sellers from the buyers. You really aren’t supposed to do that and we didn’t read them anyway. Neither my seller nor I had the time nor inclination. After getting the first couple offers in, I knew I had to organize the data so I set up a spreadsheet and filled in the columns as the offers poured in: Realtor, Realtor’s email address, price, loan amount, cash down, loan/appraisal/inspection contingencies, and close of escrow. I had so many emails stuffing my inbox, I included the email address column for fear I might later have difficulty locating the best offer. Then I created a new folder called ‘offers’ in my email, just to keep everything in the same place.
To make things easy, I sorted the offers by price and the top offers were all pretty close, the best of which had no contingencies. We accepted that offer and went pending the same night. There are a few lessons to take away from this experience:
- The single-family housing market in the North Bay es en fuego!
- If you are a buyer in the Spring of 2022, you better be prepared to make your offer stand out if you want to have a chance in these multiple offer situations
- The ratio of qualified buyers to available homes is tragic for buyers, and possibly the best I’ve ever seen it for sellers
- Interest rates rose to 4.375% this week, far higher and quicker than market pundits predicted, which has put more pressure on buyers
- Buyers are feeling the squeeze and properties are getting bid out of their range. More than a few will be priced out and unable to purchase the home of their dreams
I’ve lived long enough to know this type of market won’t last forever. You gotta ride the waves while they are breaking, because we don’t know when the next swell is going to hit.
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