Receiving, Reviewing and Accepting an Offer

Your house is on the market and you receive an offer. YAY!!! But what happens now?? Today I am going to talk about receiving, reviewing and accepting an offer on your home.

Receiving Offers

You may receive one or more offers on your home. Each offer will have the buyers’ terms and an expiration of offer date. You have to respond to the offer by the expiration date and time. Any terms in the contract can be negotiated and countered. 

Should you receive multiple offers, have a few options. You can accept one of the offers right away, negotiate one of the offers or reject all offers and ask for the buyers’ highest and best offers. If you choose to ask for buyers’ highest and best offers, you will need to sign a multiple offer form and I will notify the buyers’ agent of the deadline for offers. 

Reviewing Offers

When you do receive an offer, you need to look at all the terms the buyer offer and see if those terms are acceptable or you would like to counter. I will update your estimated net sheet so you can see your estimated bottom line numbers based on the specific offer. 

Multiple offers can get a little more tricky. Each buyer is going to offer different terms and it can be hard to keep everything straight in your head. How do you decide which offer is better? What if you get a cash offer but the price offered is lower than a financed offer? You also need to consider any contingencies the buyer may have on their offer. To make things a little easier, I put together a spreadsheet with the details of each offer. This way, you can compare all offers side-by-side. 

Accepting an Offer

Once you accept an offer, you will sign the offer and I will send the signed offer back to the buyers’ agent. You are officially under contract when the offer is signed by all parties. It’s important to note that South Carolina does not have attorney review. In a previous episode, I talked about how South Carolina does have attorney review and more specifics. 

The ball starts rolling once the contract is signed. The contract will be sent to the attorneys so they can start doing their work, the lender (if there is a lender involved) gets a copy of the contract to start the financing process and inspections are ordered.