Long Beach, ca

Not too long ago when the real estate market in Long Beach was heating up and buying competition was getting stiff, I was working with a buying client trying to find her and her family the perfect house to fit all 6 of them. Soon enough the day came and we found that perfect house. During our discussions of making an offer my client asked if she should submit a personal letter with the offer explaining a little bit about their family and their need to find the right house. She had been talking with her friends who were working with other Realtors and looking for homes and they had heard that a buyer should write a personal letter to accompany their offer. It’s very common to think that a personal letter should accompany an offer, and in some markets it might actually be a good idea, but in the Long Beach market I don’t believe it makes any difference. If anything, it might be more of a turn-off to the seller and I’ll explain why.

In most cases, the seller does actually want to sell their home to nice folks. They don’t want to think that some irresponsible buyer is going to move into the house and lay waste to the place that they have called home for the last several years. But even more important than that, the seller needs to make enough money on the transaction to clear the note, pay the listing agent, pay for closing costs, and walk away with enough extra money to use as a down payment for their next home.

Almost as important as the purchase price, sellers are worried about timing of the transaction. They don’t want to waste a lot of time on buyers who are uncertain about the house or have lots of extra caveats and contingency time frames. Remember, the sellers are almost always planning to do something with the proceeds of the sale. A complicated and long drawn-out transaction or being taken in and out of escrow with multiple weak buyers only delays the seller’s plans.

Additionally, in many cases the seller has some adjunct requirement that isn’t price and timeliness. I’ve seen a seller not wanting the buyer to ask for repairs to a broken fence, a seller who didn’t want the buyer’s appraisal to be a contingency of the sale, a seller who wanted to keep all the appliances, a seller who needed extra cash from the Realtor’s commission to get a short sale approved, and the list goes on. So how would a buyer know what to put in an offer if almost all sellers have some unique requirement? The answer is to have a very competent Realtor as your agent. It doesn’t help to just have a competent agent, you need someone who knows how to go above and beyond to get the information needed to make a solid offer, but I’ll cover this topic in another article.

So in conclusion, it takes much more than a personal letter to get an offer accepted. And in fact, the personal details of the buyer is usually not on the top of the seller’s list of requirements. Instead, the buyer should make sure that their Realtor does their best to understand what the seller’s real motivations and requirements are BEFORE submitting an offer. The problem is that if the buyer submits an offer before knowing what the seller wants, the seller will, by default, need to submit a counter offer in order to add these additional requirements to the contract. And during the time of them signing the buyer’s offer subject to a counter offer, them sending the counter offer to the buyer, and then the buyer signing the counter offer, the seller could have received a much better offer.