Looking for Woodinville homes, Kingsgate homes? Negotiating home sale: offers and counter offers, Washington State real estate law.
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Negotiating the Home Sale
My job as your real estate agent is to watch out for your interests and move the process along with attention to detail.
To assure the best possible outcome, all participants in the transaction should be honest, realistic, flexible and accessible.
→ Offers and counter offers When a prospective buyer makes a written offer, including “valuable consideration” (earnest money), and the seller countersigns the offer as is, you have a contract. In Washington State the form used for this contract is the Purchase and Sale Agreement. If the seller had made even the smallest change to the offer, we would have had no contract but a counter offer.
→ Conditions and Contingencies A condition for the deal to close may be major, such as replacing the roof which the buyer has disclosed as leaking in the “Structural” portion of the Property Disclosure Statement. Another, and very common contingency, may be that the buyer needs to sell his or her current home first.
A standard contingency (required by the lender and paid for by the buyer) is that the home pass a general - structural and mechanical - inspection. Specific inspections, such as that for termites may also be stipulated.
Other contingencies are of the financial and legal variety. For example the buyer must obtain financing by a certain date. A legal hurdle may have surfaced during the title search. It may show that the title is being held by you and your former spouse, even if the home became yours under the divorce agreement.
→ Deadlines An accountant, when asked what was the most important number on an income statement, said: the date. That applies to real estate contracts. The Purchase and Sale Agreement must have an expiration date, so does the counter offer, the condition to obtain financing, the inspection to be completed, deficencies of title to be corrected; the list goes on. Part of my job, as your agent, is to make certain all deadlines are met.
→ Forms and more forms There are more than 100 forms in the Forms Library of the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS), the organization I belong to as an agent of Brio Realty. Available to be filled out online, they cover everything, including the Notice of Termination of Agreement for Failure to Pay Earnest Money to a Pet Agreement for rental property. These forms are but one of the many services of the NWMLS that enable me to provide valuable services to you as the seller or buyer.
