"I wish to be cremated."

"One tenth of my ashes shal be given to my agent, as written in our contract."
Groucho Marx

Contracts are scary!


Real Estate contracts should not be scary for the buyer or the seller. I believe that a successful Real Estate transaction should be a win win for both parties and that is one of the reasons we are still in business. You should understand what you are signing and that is up to your agent to inform you. Real Estate schools in Florida are a very big business, time consuming, expensive and the state test is not easy as it shouldn’t be. Bottom line is you learn just enough to be dangerous. Your broker has to be able to answer your questions and go over the contract several times before you actually write one.



When you find a property that will work for you and you want to make an offer. Your agent should show you comparable properties that have sold to base your offer on. The same is true for the listing agent he or she should show comps to the seller to see if the offer is good or a low ball. We always send the comps that we are using to the listing agent and ask that they share with the seller to avoid an insult in some cases.



A cash offer is of course an attractive offer in a couple of ways. No financing of course and appraisal is not necessary however I recommend that my buyers make the offer contingent on the sale appraising at or above the sale price since who wants to buy a property that doesn’t appraise. If financing is involved the buyer and seller should pay attention to the loan commitment date, if you can’t get the commitment for mortgage by the required date then essentially you no longer have a contract. Buyers must make a good faith effort to get financing or they put their escrow in jeopardy.



Inspection period is another important date to keep in mind. I like to make this as short as possible, usually 10 days. It alleviates a lot of stress for buyer and seller to know the condition of the property they are buying. The as-is contract is a tool essentially. It sounds very good to the seller as they think they will not be liable for any repairs. The as-is contract allows for inspection and cancellation if not acceptable to the buyer. What happens if the inspection is done and found to need a new AC then the buyer has the option to counter and say they will go forward with a new AC if provided by seller or otherwise they cancel with no liability. This should be explained to seller when offer is received. We have seen some very irate sellers when this wasn’t explained which actually be done before an offer is received.



These are only a couple of things to make your Real Estate transactions less stressful.



Thanks



Jim Bagwell