Our First (Own) Offers

My wife, brother and I have been scouring the MLS the past few days looking for new properties; now that we’re down to a single rehab and have two properties on the market, it feels as if we have nothing to do! Things are getting boring, and we’re ready to acquire at least one more property…

Unfortunately, nothing decent has come on the market in the past week (hopefully just a anomaly), but it’s given us the incentive to go through the MLS and try to find some older listings that might be good deal but have been overlooked by other investors. We spent much of Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday searching, and while we came across two houses that were likely fantastic deals, both were put under contract just 24 hours earlier.

Today, my wife and I spent much of the day looking some more, and with the decision to start looking at some higher priced listings (with higher after-repair values), we came across a few properties that seemed like good candidates. After narrowing down our list, we decided to put offers on two of them.

The nice thing is that — now that my wife has her real estate license — these offers will come directly from us. We write the contracts, we negotiate on our own behalf, and if we close any deals, we get to keep the commission. My wife spent much of Monday night putting together the two offers (while the contracts seem boilerplate, there are some nuances that are very important); tomorrow she will sit down with her broker to go through them to make sure she didn’t overlook anything. I have a feeling that once we get through this process once or twice, we’ll be able to churn out offers quickly and easily, making the whole process more efficient — and ultimately more lucrative.

Both offers that we put out there were lowball offers (one of the properties has been on the market for over a year), so I’m keeping my fingers crossed…