I’ve been looking to purchase a house and finally found the home of my dreams. I will have to finance the house and all the processes involved in that (approval, inspections, surveys, etc…) are bound to take a few weeks. The home is being sold by owner and this is my first time to purchase a house. What should I do in order to make sure nobody else comes along and steals the house away from me while I’m waiting for financing?
Offer them their asking price, right now. If it’s anything like CA, they will have multiple offers at list, and you could get caught in a bidding war.
You make the offer first, they accept, then you do the financing and other closing stuff. Email me if you have questions, if you want. My info is CA info, but it might help.
Once the owner signs a contract and their attorney approves it, the house is off the market. Nobody else can bid on it until it closes, or the deal is cancelled through the attorneys.
sit out front with a shotgun!
no, better idea: earnest money/option period…settle on a reasonable sum with the owner that you would give them to show good faith (and which would be applied toward the purchase price when you do buy it) in exchange for a period of several weeks during which they may take back-up offers, but give yours priority over all others (no matter how good they are!). If you can’t get financing, or you change your mind, they keep the check, otherwise, that $100 (or something…) is part of your down payment.
Or what Annie
said, dangit, what Annie-Xmas said!
btw, IANAR(ealator)
You’re buying a house without a lawyer, or an agent, or any professional help at all? Boy, that sound’s scary to me. You can really get burned if you screw up. Look for a book (with forms and stuff) in your local bookstore.
Peace,
mangeorge
Having just been through this…in MN, from both the buy and sell side…
If you offer them their asking price, immediately, no conditions then they will most likely accept. Once they accept, it’s done.
HOWEVER…
I do not recommend this. You MUST have an inspection. NO EXCEPTIONS! Many people must also have conditions of financing and others.
The seller will most likely say. OK, but I’m going to keep the house on the market until you remove all the conditions.
The ‘usual’ compromise is that the seller will keep the house on the market but that you have x days (IME 3 days) to eliminate your conditions. Things move very fast.
We sold our townhouse because the guy offered us $2K over our asking price with no conditions (not recommended)
We always put an inspection condition when we looked. We could back out if we didn’t like the inspection. Good thing too because our first offer the inspector called me at work and told me he needed me there and then explained there was major structural damage in excess of $90,000 and most likely much more! $300 well spent!!
Our second offer we tried to ‘steal’ a house. It was already sold but with conditions (finance). We offered $3K more than asking and only an inspection condition. The owner really wanted to sell to us but the other buyers managed to get rid of their finance condition by having their parents pay cash (!) and, I guess, they pay them back.
Worked for the best. We gave up on the overpriced, hectic used houses and bought new. 
Hopefully this helps.
You really should get a real estate attorney. The money you spend (and it’s not a whole lot, relative to the purchase price) will save you a lot of headaches.
An attorney would have told you that if the buyer accepts your offer in writing (oral agreements don’t mean jack) he can’t “take it back” and sell to someone else until the period of time agreed upon in the contract for inspection, financing approval, etc., has passed.
I repeat: you really should get yourself a real estate attorney.
If I were selling a house, the “no financing yet” part would make me absolutely not sign anything. After all, you could back out (if you couldn’t get financing, and let’s face it if you wanted to back out, you could find a way to make financing fall though), but the seller couldn’t.
Not a very fair deal for the other guy, and I’m sure he’ll realize that immediately when you propose it to him.
If I were in your shoes, I would make friends with the owner, and make him want to sell the house to you on a personal level. Explain your situation and timing (find out as best you can how soon you’ll have financing), and ask him to wait at least until that date before closing anything. Accept that there’s a good chance he’ll get some better offers between now and then that it’s only fair you beat.
And of course, make that financing happen ASAP.
Penumbra, in Texas (if the house is also in Texas), a real estate agent working on your behalf will not cost you anything - the commission comes out of the purchase price.
Otherwise, check the forms at the Texas Real Estate Commission site. The forms on that site are what real estate agents are obligated to use. They are pretty fair to both seller and buyer, and there is one that covers what you want to do.
I once perused a short but delightful comedy in which a gentleman attempted to keep others away from an amusement park he wished to purchase by costuming himself as a spectre of some sort and wandering the grounds of the place, thus frightening away the curious. However, a young band of adolescents, possessing a canine of the Great Dane breed, caught wind of and unmasked his scheme, after which I believe he came afoul of the local constabulary. Deuced if I can remember the name of the thing, I’m afraid.
**BEEP BEEP BEEP SARCASM ALERT BEEP BEEP BEEP **
I so hope your being sarcastic and not forgetting the wonders of scooby doo.
If you did forget Scooby I guess all I can do is pray for your lost soul.
Haven’t you seen the Volkswagen commercials? All you do is, watch for potential buyers. When you see one approaching, lick the house!
Damn you, norinew! This was the first thing I thought of when I saw the thread title, and I read through the entire thread hoping nobody would beat me to it.
Seriously, from my limited home buying experience I definitely agree with the “no purchase without an inspection” people. We hadn’t bothered, and after we moved in we found a number of things that needed to be done - nothing major, but I might have lowered my offer or insisted that the seller fix them before closing had I known.
I might call a Realtor & ask about a house they have for sale & then give them this sort of question about how I know that Im going to get it.
missbunny… I’m going to dedicate a whole new thread to you!: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=180068
We just bought a house that was far better than we thought we could get. Here is what we did.
1: We did NOT get a lawyer. Unless your state requires the lice to be hired for buying a house, don’t bother getting one.
2: We DID get an agent. Get somebody who is not listing the house. If your state has a lot of buyers-only agents, get one of those.
3: We started the financing process before making an offer. We could not apply for a loan, but we could get a “good faith estimate” from a lender. This is a non-binding statement of how much a lender might be able to give. No sane seller will accept any offer without at least this much.
4: To lock the house in, we made an offer. We put up 1% of asking price as earnest money. We made the purchase contingent upon inspection. We also did some horse-trading on the offer, itself. A professional agent can help with the horse-trading. Once they took the offer, they were not permitted to show the house until the matter was closed.
One more thing: When hiring an inspector, get a truly independent inspector. Inspectors who are recommended by realtors have a vested interest in making realtors happy–they stop getting recommended if they discover “deal-killers” (unacceptable flaws).
Likewise, do not get an inspector who promises that you’ll have their final report on the spot and on site. This will just be a superficial checklist.
We got an independent inspector. He cost twice as much as any other inspector in the county and we had to wait 72 hours for the final report, but in the end it was very much worth it. We ended up being able to demand and get thousands of dollars in pre-sale repairs without having to increase our offer. The sellers were over a barrel because they knew that, as soon as the flaws were reported to them by this inspector, they had to disclose them to any other potential buyers. So it was repair for us or disclose to others and drop their asking price by the cost of the repairs to get any other offers.
The extra $150.00 for the real inspection was worth it.
whatever you do, don’t offer 1% of purchase price. 500-1000 bucks is much better. the whole point is to show the buyer that you are planning to buy the house, not just a house looker or some other kind of dork. what if you want to back out? you don’t want to finance the seller’s next vacation…
Consult a real estate lawyer before signing anything unless you are willing to risk losing a lot of money.
Consider making an offer conditional upon inspection and conditional on financing.
Consider purchasing title insurance.