Lynn Norusis with the FOCUS on NoVA Real Estate team guides homebuyers through items in a contract that they should focus on to make sure they have a winning offer. Hint: it isn’t all about the highest offer price.

What do you actually offer a seller?

Here’s a quick quick little hint that most people forget: it’s not just about the price.

Obviously the price that you offer to purchase someone’s home is a huge factor, however, there’s a lot more that goes into getting that winning contract. So while you do want to offer a fair price that all starts with running the comps for the neighborhood and the community that this home is in. And that works where the real estate agent runs through looks at the numbers over the past 30 days, 90 days, six months to determine how much a home in that neighborhood tends to sell for, and even going down into the nitty-gritty to find out what is in that home and how is that comparable to other homes that have sold for those prices–doing that nice balancing act of how much is in the home and how many amenities and upgrades and stuff have gone into it to determine what that price is.

Once you have run the comps with your real estate agent and you come up with what a fair price that you feel is for the house, the next thing to do is also look at the contingencies. There are many different contingencies that go into an offer that you can put forward: home inspection contingency, appraisal contingency and financing contingency. Now there is another contingency that does tend to come up a lot in Northern Virginia and that is either the HOA or the condo document review. That is not a contingency that you can wave so that is a contingency that will always stay if you are in a community that has one of those associations.

Now you can waive a contingency and that is something that you actually really want to talk about with your real estate agent to find out if it’s worth waiving a contingency and how comfortable you are with waving one of those contingencies; again, those contingencies are: the home inspection, appraisal contingency and financing contingency. I’m not going to get too much into those because we have other videos explaining those, so make sure to check those out.

The last thing you also want to look at is the settlement timing. That is another offer option in the contract that you can play around with a lot. A good agent is always going to get on the phone with the listing agent to find out as much information about the seller as they possibly can prior to putting in an offer, and one of those is finding out how quickly does the seller want to close on a home. If you can work with the seller and try and get a quick close done that’s going to look very beneficial for you in their eyes. The other thing is maybe they need a longer time in the home so you would be willing to do a rent back to where you purchase the home but then rent it back to that seller for a certain amount of time for what their needs are.

There’s a lot, obviously, that goes into a contract and this is just a small portion of it. Always go in depth with your real estate agent to find out how to make the best offer on a home that is your dream home.

If you have any questions about Northern Virginia real estate, reach out as we are happy to help.