making an offer on a property in Florida without a realtor

[Lisa Mauritis]

Hi BP Community,

Can any one tell me which of the contracts In the BP Resources File Place  I should use to make an offer on a property (non mls)  in Florida?  Also, do I send the deposit directly to the title/closing company of the seller?  I have only purchased  property through realtors in the past and given them the deposit with the contract that they had prepared.

Thanks in advance for your help BP Community!

[Brandon M.]

Lisa, 

If you Google "Florida as is real estate contract" you will find multiple links with the standard form. I don't want to copy and paste any links in here because most of them are directly from a company's website and I don't want to seem like I am promoting any of them. They all use the standard form. This is the easiest form to use that lays out all of the things you need to negotiate between yourself and the seller, and will come up in Adobe Acrobat so you could fill it out online instead of hand-writing it. Technically you could really just use your own format, offer price, time to close, etc, handwritten or typed up in Word and that could be accepted as an official contract, but the standard as-is is the easiest way to make sure all i's are dottted and t's are crossed. 

In terms of title company you can either add in a title company you have used in the past or ask if the seller has someone specific they would like to use. Because the property isn't listed it is possible the seller has not picked out a title company to use yet, but it would be a good thing to ask them before submitting the offer.