Best Time to Make An Offer
By Tim Thornton

If you are looking for the best time to make an offer on a home, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First of all, and most importantly, if you can make an offer without a competitive bid, you have a great deal more leverage to negotiate. Making an offer when there are no other bidders can be as simple as jumping on an opportunity as soon as you find the right property. Most buyers know the right home for them almost immediately. Experienced buyers know they must move quickly. The inexperienced may want to wait, or think about the purchase for days or weeks–often waiting until it is too late. I would say that this is the most common mistake made by first time home buyers.
Some additional “rules of thumb” to consider when timing your offer include:

* “Low Times” in the calendar. There are certain times in almost every quarter when you may be the only person bidding on a property. For example, between Thanksgiving and December 26th are seasonal lows, when fewer buyers are out looking for houses. Buying a home when the weather is particularly bad may be ideal due to the lack of other buyers to compete with your bid.

* The beginning of the week can be a good timing strategy, but if you find a house on a Friday in the peak summer months and then you wait until Tuesday to make an offer, you may be disappointed–as the same things that you liked about the property may be attractive to other buyers as well and in the end, you may have unexpected competition.

* Buying an inventory home from a new home builder at specific times can give you a huge advantage, but you have to understand what is important to that particular builder at that point in time. All builders have different financial drivers and fiscal calendars. This is where you need a savvy Realtor to help you determine what motivates a given builder, when and where the best deals can be made–based on their quarterly revenue and sales motivations at that point in time.

* 30 days after school starts in the fall can be a good time to harvest a deal from sellers who did not sell in the peak season from May to August. These sellers may be feeling anxious about the fact that their home did not go under contract. Not all sellers are desperate and not all sellers have to sell. Each situation has to be taken as a unique opportunity. It is important that your Realtor help you figure out as much as possible about the opportunities at hand.

* Making an aggressive offer on a house that has been listed above market value for more than 90-120 days can be a good strategy. If you wait until the house comes down to market value, you will have more buyer competition–but getting in before the seller decides to lower the price may mean that you create their new price-point and then close the deal with no competition.

* Short Sales may be a good opportunity, but only if you have lots of time, and a great deal of patience. Getting a short sale can take many months, and may require making many offers on properties before you get a bank to start negotiating over your offer. These are the most difficult and convoluted of today’s real estate market. Anyone who tells you that short sales is easy should be challenged and asked how many short sales they have completed this year. The very best short sales experts will tell you that it is not a business for the faint of heart or those whose deadlines are already set.

* Foreclosures. Once again I have to qualify the opportunity and say that not all foreclosures are good deals, and foreclosures generally violate all of the other premises of this article. Foreclosures almost always have high visibility among buyers. To win in the foreclosure market you must be smarter and faster than “the next guy”, and you have to know what you are doing to diagnose, repair and remodel a home. If you have only seen it on TV, never really remodeled a home that has significant issues and challenges, you are taking a big risk in thinking that foreclosures are a place to save big money in Real Estate. It is not as easy as it appears on the flat screen in your living room.

At the end of the day, there are always opportunities. My recommendations to you: (1) Find the right Realtor. (2) Find the right community or area. (3) Find a home that you connect with emotionally. And then plan a strategy to buy that home. If you can buy when there are few other buyers bidding on that particular home, and you play it smart with your Buyer’s Agent–you could come out ahead of the game.

This may seem like self serving advice, but I believe it is seldom in your best interest as a buyer, to go directly to the seller or the seller’s agent and negotiate without a buyer’s agent (Realtor®) representing you. This is true for new homes as much as for resell homes. I know this seems counter-intuitive and you may feel as though you have a cost advantage by going directly to the seller or you may think that your business skills make you a better negotiator than your Realtor. However, if your Buyer’s Agent is a smart business professional and a strategic negotiator, you should come out ahead every time by partnering with a Realtor® for your next home purchase..