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Updated about 13 years ago, 10/17/2011
Techniques: Getting the bank to accept your offer
I'm sure there are a few posts for this floating around, but I wanted to bring it up again and open up some ideas.
How do YOU get the banks to accept your offer, either short sale or REO?
My first (and only, to date) investment property was a 4 year-old house owned by the bank. I jumped at the opportunity to own a near-new house as a rental in an up and coming neighborhood. The list price was $119,000. I offered $101,000, and eventually accepted an offer for $107,100. The house was worth approximately $155,000, not too bad for my first time.
I did this all wrong. Knowing what I know now, I would have done some things different. As soon as you walked in this house, there were some obvious problems with the house, MOLD being the first one. I feel if I had taken pictures (lots of them), and had a mold inspection done on the spot with proof that the home had mold, and submitted all of that evidence to the bank with an offer of say $85,000, I just might have gotten it, or gotten a good counter offer way south of my actual accepted offer.
What do YOU do? Test for mold? Test for lead paint? Get several contractor estimates to fix it up, and submit the HIGHEST one, knowing it won't actually cost that much? What are the pros doing to consistently get the bank to become very, very motivated and accept an offer much lower than their asking price?
Chime in!
Adam