Are your Buyers Bailing?

Hey, everybody. Do you want to know a couple of tips to keep your deal together? Nothing worse than when you work hard and you write an offer on a property. You get the offer accepted. The buyer is excited. A week later, for some silly reason, the buyer is backing out. They’re buying a $500,000 house, and oh, the boiler wasn’t serviced properly, so now I want to back out. There’s more of that going on right now, and the reason is, the market slowed. The buyer smelled blood in the water. The buyers see more choices on the market.

Market obviously slowed back in August. Over the last three weeks, it’s been much busier which is fantastic, because buyers are saying the opportunity and they know that if they buy now, they’ll likely pay less. Not likely, most likely pay less than they would in the spring. The problem is, in this type of environment, buyers have no problem walking away from a deal and sellers don’t quite get that. Sellers are used to ruling the roost. Sellers are trying to be tough. Buyers know that they have a little bit of leverage right now. They’re totally willing to just get up and walk away.

Many of them will regret it because they’ll end up paying more come spring. I’m in Watertown Square right now, just dropped my car off at the shop. I’m heading home. I was texting with our Director of Operations about it. What can you do to get more of your deals to stay together? Very frustrating when a buyer backs off for no reason. Obviously, if there’s something really wrong with the house and the buyer backs out; well, so be it. If it’s above them, if they don’t have the money to fix it, totally understandable, but let’s face it. Eight out of 10 times, that’s not the case. Eight out of 10 times, it’s a buyer just being greedy, asking for too much. How do you solve that? The way you solve that is communication; extra communication.

When I was out selling for years, 2004 to 2011, market was horrible. Horrible. When I would get an offer accepted, I used to do this thing where I would go back over things with the buyer. Hey, keep in mind, we made the offer the way we did, because we knew you that had to replace all those gutters. We knew that you would have to, whatever it was. Service the boilers, because it hasn’t been serviced in five years. We knew that you’d have to repaint the bulkhead because it’s all rusty. Just keep that in mind. When we made the offer, we did that on purpose. The other thing that I would do is between getting the offer accepted and the time of inspection. I would over communicate to the buyer. I would talk to the buyer a lot, “Hey, are you ready for that inspection tomorrow?” Keep in mind, it’s the inspector’s job to find something wrong at the house. Believe me, they’re going to do their job. There’s not a house in the world that doesn’t have something wrong with it. My arm is getting tired. Talk to them about that.

We also have an email that we use, that we send to buyers, prior to the home inspection to confirm it. In that email, we recommend that they do things like, “Hey, bring your measuring tape if you want to take measurements of the property.” What else do we tell them? We tell them if you have any family members or contractors that want to see the house, bring it with you, bring them with you. Get everything out of the way at that time.

The other thing that I recommend is, people utilize that blog, that we put out a few weeks ago, that said, “No, there’s nothing wrong with that house.” Within that blog, we talked about the market being different in the fall. What we did more importantly, is we showed sold statistics of homes that were listed last fall, didn’t sell that ended up being relisted in the spring and sold for much more than they were listed for in the fall. You’ve got to show buyers this, because these houses that they’re backing out on right now, they’re going to be paying more for that house come spring. Even though the markets adjusted a bit, no question about it. They’re going to be paying more come spring because inventory will be lower. You’ve got to show them those things.

Just a quick recap. Like I said, communication. Extra communication with the buyer, because people and their family are talking to them and telling them all kinds of things. Putting things in their ears that scare them; family, coworkers things like that. You want to communicate with them. You also want to educate them. Utilize that email. If you guys want to see that email that we use for buyers, please post your email here and we’ll send it to you. Lindsey will probably say, “Say yes, and a robot will send it.” I say just put your email and we’ll send you the actual email that we recommend you using. Send them the, “No, there’s nothing wrong with that house blog that has those examples in it.” I will post that in the comments below and nothing is more important than communication. You’ve got to be in communication with the buyer, educating them, letting them know what’s going on. Don’t let them get out of hand and get all wound up, because they’re going to end up spending more money in the spring and they’re going to regret it.

Keep your deals together, my friends. All right. I was going to run on the way home, and here I am walking half the walk. Hey, nice to have you guys with me. Again, leave your email if you want to use that email that our agents use because it really helps. Have a good day, guys.