And even though the market is slowing down a little bit, it is still competitive out there. You still got to put together a winning offer in the Current Real Estate Market with your agent. My name is Eric Sztanyo from Keller Williams Realty and team Sztanyo.com, where we are helping you find your home and strengthen your family. I’m in the team Sztanyo Van Yo and I wanted to give you guys a real life case study of how to make a winning offer in the Current Real Estate Market. We just went under contract with some buyers this morning, and I kind of wanna walk you through that process and given this current market that we’re in right now, it is the last day of November. We’re heading into those colder months. The market is certainly not as hot as it was back in May, June, July of 2021, when it was on fire, both here in Cincinnati and really all across the country.
Knowing Your Current Market Status
So it’s not that crazy hot, but it is still a seller’s market. And so I wanna walk you through a few tips on how to make sure you get your offer to win, even though the market it’s cooled a little bit, but it’s still a seller’s market.
So here’s a situation. Had some clients contact me from YouTube. They were living in Illinois in kind of a smaller, not a small city, but a smaller than Cincinnati city. Kids are grown up, in college now. And they’re like, “Hey, we wanna move to a bigger city. We want to enjoy some of the perks that a major Metro like Cincinnati has to offer.” So they moved here a little over a year ago. They both work for a local hospital here and they decided, “Hey, we don’t wanna live in an apartment anymore. We rented for a year. We want to go buy a house.”
They called me up and we got to work. So what is the status of the market right now? It’s like I said, it’s not as crazy hot as it was in May, June, July this year. When, if you put anything on the market as a listing agent, you were golden because you were gonna see probably 20, 30 showings in the first two, three days. You might get 8, 10, 12 offers and you look like a hero. You can basically just present all those offers to your client. You could dictate the terms to all the buyers saying, “Hey, we want your highest and best offer by 8:00 PM on Sunday night, we’re gonna review all the offers we’re gonna pick. Which one we think is the prettiest of the ball. It was easy peasy for sellers.
It was terrible for buyers. I mean, super hard, super complicated. You may have made an offers on 2, 3, 4 homes and just lose. And it was really challenging. The market’s not that hot right now, but it’s still a seller’s market. Supply is still low. Demand is still high, but whereas you may have seen, like I said, 8, 10, 12 offers back in the summer. Right now you might see 2, 3, 4, 5 offers, something like that. And so you still have competition as a buyer. It’s not like every house out there you can put an offer at list price or even below, but the market has changed a little bit. So let’s talk about some strategies on how to win in the current market.
Tips To Make A Winning Offer In The Current Real Estate Market
A Winning Offer In The Current Real Estate Market :Tip number one. And this is something that’s changed from the summer, but you can find some houses that have been on the market for a week, two weeks, three weeks, even. And that’s what we did with these buyers. Actually, we went out and we found some properties that have been out there a little bit. And the reason why they Haven sold yet is they’ve got something wrong with them. Either, they’re not updated very well, there’s some work to do, there’s some cosmetic updates to do or the sellers saw all their neighbors houses selling in the summer and they’ve overpriced. And so you can find some of those properties that are out there. That’s what we did first with these buyers. We went shopping. We looked at a few of them. A couple of them were actually rentals previously, nice homes, but they weren’t in nice condition. The landlords were kind of like, “oh, the market’s super hot. I don’t have to do anything with the property. I’m gonna put it out there.”
They were dirty. They were not updated. And they were sitting on the market. So when you’re in a seller’s market, this is definitely one strategy you can use to win at an offer is go in there. When you see a property that’s been out there now a couple weeks, maybe even a month, you can put in a lower offer. You’re gonna have less competition for anything that you see. Now, remember when you go look at this house, it’s not gonna be as pretty as the other ones, it’s gonna be a little uglier. It’s gonna smell a little funny. There’s gonna be some work to do. But if you don’t want to deal with all of the hassle and all of the stress of trying to compete against other buyers in a multiple offer situation, this could be a good option for you.
A Winning Offer In The Current Real Estate Market : Second tip. I talked about it with these buyers. It was like, “Hey, if you don’t find something you like, you could do new construction.” New construction’s a way to win. And at an offer, you’re not competing usually against anybody. You’re just go and talkto the builder. Now the problem with that right now, I mean, there’s pros and cons. But in terms of square footage for your dollar, you’re definitely gonna get more in terms of square footage for your dollar on a resale home than you would new construction right now. So if you wanna win, if you’re okay spending a little bit more or getting a little bit less house for whatever your budget is, new construction might be the way to go.
Make sure you hang on to the end, cuz I’ve got some tips that I specifically suggested to these buyers and they ended up working perfectly. And if you like this content, please go ahead and like us. Subscribe to the channel, hit the notification bell. We’re bringing you all kinds of great content here on local real estate in the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky markets.
A Winning Offer In The Current Real Estate Market : Tip number three. Still a seller’s market even when it’s cooled off is shop a little bit below your budget. So if you don’t wanna buy one that’s a little bit of an ugly duckling and you wanna buy one of those homes that is coming out and you think it’s gonna sell fast because it looks like it’s priced right. And it looks like the condition is in good shape. It’s been updated. It’s been kept up well. Then what you probably want to do is. let’s say your your budget is $350. You might wanna shop for that in that $325- $330 type range so that you could potentially go up.
You could potentially do an offer over ask price Alongside of that tip. When you see the house that you wanna strike on. And here’s what happened with these buyers. We were in the house of the rental that they didn’t like. Because there’s still houses that are going in one day in two days. I said, “if you see one that you really like, let me suggest to you a couple of things that we can do with our offer. Have you ever heard of an escalation clause?” And they were like, “Nope. Don’t know what that is.” The easiest way to explain an escalation clause is this. If you’ve ever been on eBay and you’ve ever auction bought items on auction on eBay, it’s simply the max offer feature.
That’s what an escalation clause, where what you’re trying to do is not outbid yourself. You wanna win the auction, but you don’t wanna pay more than you have to. And so an escalation clause simply says that it says, let’s say your base offer is $325, but you’re willing to go up to $345,000 or $350,000, which is the max ceiling you’re comfortable with, the top of your budget or whatever you’re comfortable with as a buyer. But that allows you then as an agent might get right now, like I said, a seller might get 2, 3, 4 offers right now. It allows you to beat out all those other offers without overpay.
All right, the last few tips, even if you’re close on price, which you might be with other competitive buyers, you wanna make your offer attractive to the seller. So put yourself in the seller’s shoes and think through what would make the transaction simple and easy for them.
A Winning Offer In The Current Real Estate Market : Tip number four. One of the things that you can do in order to do that is make a clean offer. What do I mean by that? A clean offer simply, “Hey, here’s our purchase price and we’re not gonna ask for any closing costs. We’re not gonna ask for any home warranty.” It’s simple. The math is easy when they see that you’re not asking for closing costs, they know that you’re a strong buyer. They know that you can afford those closing costs yourself. It just positions you in a better light to the seller. Even if your dollar number is the same as somebody else who might be asking for closing costs, you look stronger because your offer is clean.
Here’s a tip that I think will put us over the edge on this one. Besides our offer price was that I spoke to my buyers and said, one thing you might wanna do again, to make this simpler for the seller is say, you’re gonna wave any repairs.
A Winning Offer In The Current Real Estate Market : Tip number five. I don’t recommend this on every single house, but if you’re looking at a house that’s newer, that’s maybe 5, 10, 11, 20 years old. And you’ve got a pretty good feeling of the house. Maybe, you know houses pretty well. You can see there might be some minor cosmetic things, but what you can do is wave repairs. Now, what I don’t necessarily recommend is waving your inspection totally. So the way we worded it in this offer was, “Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Seller again, we’re gonna make this easy for you. We’re gonna wave all repairs. You’re not gonna have to pay anything. After we go under contract, it’s gonna be easy and simple for you. We’re not gonna ask you to fix anything. We’re not gonna ask for any money. Now, we still do want to have our inspection, but the inspection and the way we word this is the inspection is for informational purposes only.
And so what that does is it still protects you, my buyer by allowing you to have the inspection. If there’s something crazy in that inspection you don’t like if there’s mold, if there’s foundation issues. If there’s something major, you’re like, “Ooh, I don’t like that.” You can still back out. At least with a Kentucky deal. In Kentucky you could say, Hey, we’re out. We found something we didn’t like now we’re not asking for repairs. We’re just backing out of the deals. So you’re you still have that contingency to back out. And if there’s nothing to measure wrong, then you just got that report. That’s helpful for you. You can touch up the little things that might need to be touch up. Usually 80% to 90% of my deals, the inspection repairs that we ask for in that inspection period are usually probably between a thousand and $3,000.
So a lot of deals could blow up over that in the grand scheme of things. That’s not a ton of money. And so to be able to make your offer clean to the sellers and say, “we’re not asking for anything.” Again, that’s just putting you a notch ahead any other buyer to help you win that offer and get under contract.
Couple last tips I have. This is important for you as the buyer because it matters who your agent is, but these tips are really for the agents.
A Winning Offer In The Current Real Estate Market : Tip number six. Agent, you have to call the listing agent before you make the offer. You have to contact them and understand where you at with other offers, where you at with activity. Do you have any other offers in hand? What happened in this case, I had the showing set up. They did a good job because they said we have an offer in hand. It expires at 5:00 PM. Our showing was at 4:30 PM. So what that agent was effectively doing was saying, “Hey, if you wanna put an offer, you need to let me know ASAP. So we don’t accept this other offer and you need to come in hot.” Now what I did, I said, “could you give me any other info information about that offer and where it’s at?” What does that do for my buyer? If we’re serious about the house and we wanna win it, it might give us information to beat that other offer. What does that do for the seller? For the seller, that agents, they got to talk to their seller and make sure they can do this, but they could say, “Hey, I think we can get these buyers to come higher. Then the current offer we had, they told us we’ve got a clean offer at list price. Great!
Before we even went and saw that house, I told my buyers, there’s another offer, It’s clean at list price. So if we wanna win this offer, we got to go over. They were like, yep. Got it. Totally. So we came in, we saw the house, they loved it. We came in with an escalation clause. We waved any repairs, we’d asked for no repairs and we made the offer clean.
Final thing. I would say here, the last tip before we get off, is this matters too guys, trust me. This matters.
A Winning Offer In The Current Real Estate Market : Tip number seven. The way your agent communicates is a big deal. When I’m on the listing side of things and I get several offers and they are similar in nature, but one agent just makes a lot of mistakes. Maybe they make mistakes in the way they draft up the contract. Maybe they made some typos or didn’t fill some things outright, maybe in their email, they made some typos. If I’m getting an impression from you that you’re gonna be a headache to work with. if all offers a are similar listing agents may say, Hey, they may elevate or give potentially the buyer’s agent a chance to beat another offer. If they feel like you’re gonna be better to work with than some other moron . And I feel like I can safely say that in this industry, there’s a few morons. There’s a few, not so good agents. It happens but have mean the right agent does matter.
Help In Buying And Finding The Right Home
That’s gonna wrap it up from this one. I hope that helps you understand in this market where it has cooled off a little bit. You still need to have strategies to go in there and win. If you’re getting in a competitive situation, make sure you’re choosing the right agent for that. We would love to work with you at team Sztanyo to help you buy and find the right home that’s gonna help strengthen your family, your family’s mission, your family’s vision. You can email me directly would love to work with you. Eric.Sztanyo@kw.com. Thank you for being a part of the team Sztanyo Clan Yo and we’ll see you in the next one.