A client sent me this photo, drink in hand. She was celebrating the termination for the sale of her home. Yes, you read that right, her home was going back on the market (BOM). Sometimes you should celebrate a termination, they aren’t all bad... it could save you thousands!
When listing a home in Oregon or Washington, a seller doesn’t have as much control as a buyer to walk away or terminate a transaction. Most terminations happen during the inspection period – and rightfully so, this is when the buyer is doing their due diligence on the subject property. During the inspection period, a buyer will conduct various inspections but also gather bids for repairs, sometimes for negotiating or their knowledge, and often a mixture of the two.
Speaking from the side of a seller in this case, or rather as the listing agent, it is important to know when repair requests are justified or outright unrealistic because believe me, it gets nutty. I tend to focus on health and safety items, as well as the general livability of the home. If the roof won’t make it through the winter, this is an issue. If there is a little bit of debris in the crawl space, maybe a small puddle or two, add that to your to-do list for home maintenance, it’s not a repair request.
For my client’s transaction that was just terminated, the buyer went above and beyond to be unrealistic. Throughout the 2-week inspection period (10 business days in Oregon), their buyer would gather somewhere between 8-10 bids, some as nominal as topping the nails on the roof with tar ($140-$200). Now to be clear, this is their right and certainly a part of due diligence, and I made it a point to be present at my client’s home for these bids since it began to become uncomfortable with endless strangers walking through their home.
My clients made it clear from the start since they were giving a $10,000 credit toward the buyer’s closing costs that they would be unwilling to do any repairs. When the repair request came our way, there was $13k+ in listed repairs, and rather than get into the specifics, I’ll just note it went as far as asking for the caulking between the joints of their siding to be scraped out and redone... the home was painted 5 years ago, and built-in 2004. It was madness. We went back and forth, the sellers were gracious and offered $3k toward the requests in good faith, but the buyers weren’t satisfied. They were never going to be satisfied.
This is when you sit back and look at the deal at hand to decide what’s important. For my sellers, it was netting as much money as possible, time is on their side. As we approach spring and better weather in Oregon, we all felt strongly there would be more suitable buyers out there. So, at this point, they had nothing to lose. Once the buyer terminated, rather than be down about it, they celebrated. Clearly, this was not the buyer for their home, so back on the market we went.
The ending of this story isn’t written yet, we’ve been back on the market for 4 days and have one new buyer incredibly interested in their home. Ultimately, I believe my sellers will net more money with buyer #2, and I’ll certainly update this post when that time comes! TBD...
Best,
Amanda
