Creative Ways to Make Your Offer Stand Out from the Crowd
In today’s real estate market, it can be difficult finding your place, and figuring out how to make yourself stand out as a home buyer. This is especially true when you are interested in a property that has gained a lot of interest from other potential buyers. So what do you do? There is the obvious answer to increasing your bid. However, for a lot of people, there is a very real limit as to how much they can spend. So what are your other options? Here are a few creative ways to help make your offer stand out from the crowd, and hopefully help you land your dream home.
Use Your Talents
When you are trying to make your offer stand out from the rest, being creative can definitely have it advantages. This is a great situation to put your talents to good use! Regardless of what they are having that little something extra to go along with your offer, will certainly help to make it stand out. Perhaps you are an artist or a writer, why not paint a picture of the house or write the seller a letter about how you can see your family living and thriving there.
Consider Adding an Escalation Clause
An escalation clause is not the most common or well-known way of making your offer stand out, however, it can be one of the most effective. With an escalation clause, you make your initial offer – say $300,000 and then add a clause, say of $5000 and then a cap price $350,000 for example. What this clause does is it automatically increases your bid above all others made by $5000 up and until your cap price. So for example, if someone made an offer of $325,000 on the same property, your original bid of $300,000 would increase to $330,000. That said, if an offer is made above your cap bid, your final offer goes no higher than the price you set as your max.
Be Cautious About Having Too Many Contingencies
While the majority of offers made do tend to have one or two contingencies, having too many is an easy way to scare sellers. Contingencies like financing and home inspection are quite normal. However, when you start adding in additional contingencies such as the sale of the potential buyers current home, things become tricky and stressful for all parties involved. For this reason, it is a good idea to limit your contingencies to only what you need to make the sale work, and for you to have peace of mind.
Be Open to Paying for Extra Costs as Opposed to a Higher Overall Price
A lot of the time when making an offer potential buyers will ask for a percentage or all of the moving costs to be paid for. While this is not an unusual request and is commonly accepted, if you are in a position where there is a lot of interest in the property in question, one of the best ways to make your offer stand out is to offer to actually pay for these.