Submitting your Offer on a Real Estate Investment Property: What to Expect

The best offer wins

This is the part where you actually have to get out of your comfort zone. Where you have to face potential rejection and disappointment.

Offering a property on the MLS is fairly straightforward. All you really have to do is reach out to a real estate agent and let them guide you through the process. Remember that as a buyer, it’s very unlikely that you will be paying any sort of commission since it’s usually the seller that picks up the bill for both the buyer and seller agent commission.

Offering on a property that is not the MLS is a little bit tricker, but still fairly simple.

Making an offer to a private seller usually starts with a verbal agreement, followed by negotiation. When a price has been settled, you can take things up officially and pull out the paperwork and do the signing.

You can also use a letter of intent as another way of being official without being official if that makes sense.

Ways of getting your hands-on

An Agreement of Purchase and Sale

without a realtor (I highly advise against this, but it’s important to understand all your options) =

Local title company

Online

Office supply store

Other investors

The Deposit:

• The intention of a deposit is to display that the buyer is seriously looking to buy the property, and is not wasting the seller or the real estate agent's time.
• Legally speaking, it is possible to lose your contract if you do not follow up on your end of the contract
• Reminder; the deposit and the downpayment are not the same things! It can be easy to mix up the two for some reason.
• Can become part of the cash the buyer pays towards the down payment
• If the sale is forfeited for no legitimate legal reason, the seller is allowed to keep the deposit, whereas if there is a legal reason, the deposit is returned to the buyer

Clauses:
Once again, clauses or conditions can be added to protect the buyer’s butt. Yet…