Home Buying & Selling Tips for Kenai, Soldotna & Real Estate on the Kenai Peninsula Alaska

Closing Cost & Down Payment

You have found your dream home. Now it’s to see if you can make it a reality.  Can you afford the monthly payment & closing costs? Make sure your lender provides you a copy of your Good Faith Estimate (GFE) and you fully understand all of the costs & expenses on it. A GFE provides you with a breakdown of your expected closing cost and how much of a down payment you will be required to have.  You will also want to clarify if your total monthly payment is going to include your property taxes and insurance.  These can add several hundred dollars onto your monthly payment.  If you get to your closing and your closing costs differ greatly from your GFE, contact your lender immediately and ask for an explanation. 

Receiving a Low Ball offer! 

Receiving a low ball offer isn’t the end of the world, so don’t get angry or upset at the potential buyers. When submitting a low offer, buyers should be aware they run the risk of insulting the sellers and getting their offer flat out rejected. Rejecting a low ball offer is one of the worst things a seller can do.  Even if you counter back at full price, this is better than completely disregarding the low offer.  You have to remember that this is now a negotiation process between you and the buyers.  Try to figure out the buyer’s motivation behind the low offer, are they serious buyers who didn’t know what to offer or are they bargain shoppers looking for a steal?  

Getting your Low Ball offer accepted!

So, you’ve decided to make an offer on a property that is substantially lower than the listing price, often called a “low ball offer”.  Before submitting your offer, there are several things to consider which might help you get your offer accepted.  Do you have specific data that shows your offer is in line with recent sales?  Are there contingencies in your contract?  Fewer contingencies increase your chances of getting accepted.  Make your offer as appealing in other areas of your contract as possible.  For example, offer to close within a very short time frame, allow the sellers to stay in the home for a month or two until they find a new home.

Welcome to HomeBuyingSellingTips.com, we hope you find our new look and feel to be much improved over our old webpage.

 Our buyers & sellers tips can still be found every Friday in the Peninsula Clarion, at the bottom right hand corner of page 3.  Past tips will also be available in the coming days as we migrage everything to the new blogging platform.