House #16: First Contract

We received our first offer on The Probate House over the weekend, and we negotiated a formal contract…

I mentioned on Friday that we had two agents who had potential buyers, and one of those agents came through with an offer on Saturday. In fact, it turns out that the agent wasn’t representing a buyer at all — he and his wife are the buyers. They have been looking for a home in the area for quite a while, and were shopping for themselves when looked out our house a couple times last week.

Also over the weekend, we received a verbal offer from an agent who took her buyers to the house Saturday afternoon. At about one o’clock Saturday, I received a call from the agent asking if the house was still available and if she could take her buyers through it; forty-five minutes later, we had the verbal offer.

We let the first buyers know about the verbal offer, and within a couple hours, they had submitted a full-price offer. While we considered waiting for the verbal offer to submit a formal offer, we decided to try moving forward with the first offer instead. There were a number of contingencies and stipulations that we weren’t completely comfortable with, so we countered with what we thought was a bit more reasonable, and by Sunday evening, we came to a formal agreement. We’ll keep the other offer as a backup in the case this one falls through.

The buyers have a long due diligence period (2 weeks) due to some personal scheduling issues they have, and the closing is five weeks out (also some personal scheduling issues). I much prefer giving our buyers short time periods for contingencies and the closing, but there were some extenuating circumstances in this case (and the overall offer was very decent), so we were willing to drag things out a bit.

I’ll have more to say late next week when we’re towards the end of the due diligence period…