My wife and I closed on a short sale in July. Our offer wasn’t the highest, but the higher offers were VA/FHA–and the seller was flat broke. Further, there was a ton of junk on the property accumulated during the seller’s father’s 50 year tenure, and all of the other buyers wanted said junk gone before closing. I knew we couldn’t offer more, so I made disposal of the junk part of our offer.
11 Dumpster loads later, I think we’re two thirds done getting rid of stuff (anyone want 20 pounds of canned spinach flakes dated 1973??). It has been an insane amount of work, and we’re doing it on a shoestring.
The point is that I took a look at the whole situation and tailored our offer to give maximum benefit to the seller–she wasn’t going to make any money, so any other benefits I could throw her way would help us quite a bit. The rest was up to the bank (short sale, remember), but that’s a roll of the dice no matter what.
You have to make your offer stand out somehow, and that means you have to talk to the seller and pay attention to what they say. We made three offers during our house hunting. One house was snapped up by someone with more money than sense (cash offer almost 20% over highest “norrmal” offer); our other two offers were accepted, both on short sales. The first of those fell through when BofA decided to play hardball with the sellers, who sensibly walked away. It is still vacant 6 months later.
