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About Teresa
Teresa Turner, Realtor & Broker, with The Teresa Turner Realty Group at Keller Williams Town & Country Realty, is one of the most established and respected names in NW Florida Real Estate with 25+ years of experience in Residential Real Estate. Over that time, she has developed a superior pipeline of connections and is the go-to person for getting results in Residential Real Estate. She understands and cares for people and is excellent at coming up with unique marketing strategies to solve complex problems and get homes sold. She keeps your personal information confidential and considers discretion to be her duty in dealing with your real estate situation. Teresa maintains a strong work ethic and is committed to building relationships based on trust and integrity. She is a Real Person with Real Solutions to your real estate needs.
Tag Archives: short sales tallahassee
Is the First Offer Really Your Best Offer?
Real estate agents around the world generally go by the same mantra when discussing the first offer that a Seller receives on their home:
“The first offer is always your best offer.”
Of course, this isn’t true in every situation, but there are reasons why Real Estate Agents believe this, and why they often suggest that Sellers either accept the first offer or at least give it serious consideration.
Get in the buyer’s head
To understand why the first offer is usually the one you should accept, consider the Buyer and the journey they are on…
Buyers in the real estate market usually start by dipping their feet into the water. This may be before they even engage a Real Estate Agent. They generally go to a few open houses, check out prices online, and start to do their homework. They may even make first contact with a Real Estate Agent to assess what the Agent thinks about the state of the local market.
From there, Buyers begin to get more serious. They may start going on private, second or third showings with their Real Estate Agent. They really start to get engaged in the process. They become “the real dealer” — a Buyer who is completely in the game, approved for a mortgage, and actively engaged with their mortgage lender or broker. Maybe they’ve even written an offer or two. They’ve narrowed down their search parameters, spent months learning the market, pricing and checking the comparables.
Real dealers are often the ones who write the first offer a Seller receives on a property. And that’s why their offers should be taken seriously.
Real dealers will likely get an email notification about your listing within hours of it going online. Or, since they are so engaged with their Real Estate Agent at this point, the Real Estate Agent may spot it first and send them a text or email.
This Buyer will want to get in and see the property ASAP. Since they’re so familiar with the market, they’ll be able to tell once they step foot inside if it will work for them, if it’s priced right, if it shows well, and if it’s in line with present or past comparable sales. If the property meets their criteria, the real dealer, armed with all their knowledge and motivation, will make an offer.
The Real Dealer
Their offer may not come in within days of a property going on the market. But it will come from an informed Buyer who is knowledgeable of the market. If a home is priced too high and a month or two goes by without an offer, it will be the Real Deal Buyer who has been watching the listing and waiting to see how the market responds. If they note that there aren’t any offers on it and there is no activity after some time, the Real Dealer will come in with a low offer, which actually may be a good offer, on the Seller’s home.
While you may see it as an insulting “low ball” offer coming out of left field, you should still look closely at this offer. Who is the Buyer? How long have they been looking? Have they written other offers nearby? Are they working with a good local Real Estate Agent? Does the offer come with a pre-approval letter? Is this offer actually a number that is close to the number your Real Estate Agent initially suggested?
As hard as it may seem to contemplate an offer much lower than your asking price, serious Sellers should look at all the signs leading up to it and consider if this is the offer to accept. Trust your Real Estate Agent. And even better, trust the phrase, “The first offer is always your best offer.”
Bottom Line…Think long and hard over that first offer.
Has Housing Hit Bottom…Crash Officially Over?
What is the current state of the US Housing Markets according to the US Secretary of Housing Shaun Donovan?
Lets start with the good news…
“We’ve just been through the best winter of home sales in five years, really since the crisis began. The number of folks in distress, the number of people who are delinquent in their mortgages, falling into foreclosure, is down dramatically. The number of new foreclosures is down by more than 50 percent since 2009.”
Now, the not so good news…
“The one place where we continue to see struggles is looking for a consistent strong recovery in house prices,” Donovan continued. “We’re seeing that in a lot of markets. But in the most distressed markets … it’s these foreclosures that are still coming on the market — what we call the shadow inventory — that are dragging down prices in a lot of places.”
“A full recovery is really going to depend upon moving this shadow inventory,”
Post courtesy of Tim & Julie Harris, Harris Real Estate University
How does a Previously Approved Short Sale Work?
A previously approved short sale is NOT a pre-approved short sale, and in some cases, the lender’s will nevertheless require the process to begin anew. However, with a previously approved short sale, some lenders will not require the process to begin completely anew (or will offer a more streamlined approval process), but more importantly, the parties will have the benefit of knowing what the lender is likely to accept the second time around, thus maximizing the chances of a successful closing prior to foreclosure.
Study: We’re getting less friendly on Facebook
Whether it’s pruning friends lists, removing unwanted comments or restricting access to their profiles, Americans are getting more privacy-savvy on social networks, a new report found.
The report released Friday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that people are managing their privacy settings and their online reputation more often than they did two years earlier. For example, 44 percent of respondents said in 2011 that they deleted comments from their profile on a social networking site. Only 36 percent said the same thing in 2009.
The findings come a day after the Obama administration called for stronger privacy protections for people who use the Internet, mobile devices and other technologies with increasingly sophisticated ways of tracking them. Pew’s findings suggest that people not only care about their privacy online but that, given the tools, they will also try to manage it.
Along those lines is “profile pruning,” which Pew reports is on the rise. Nearly two-thirds of people on social networks said last year that they had deleted friends, up from 56 percent in 2009. And more people are removing their names from photos than two years ago. This practice is especially common on Facebook, where users can add names of their friends to photos they upload.
Among other findings:
Women are much more likely than men to restrict their profiles. Pew found that 67 percent of women set their profiles so that only their “friends” can see it. Only 48 percent of men did the same.
Think all that time in school taught you something? People with the highest levels of education reported having the most difficulty figuring out their privacy settings. That said, only 2 percent of social media users described privacy controls as “very difficult to manage.”
The report found no significant differences in people’s basic privacy controls by age. In other words, younger people were just as likely to use privacy controls as older people. Sixty-two percent (62%) of teens and 58 percent of adults restricted access to their profiles to friends only.
Young adults were more likely than older people to delete unwanted comments. Fifty-six percent (56%) of social media users aged 18 to 29 said they have deleted comments that others have made on their profile, compared with 40 percent of those aged 30 to 49 and 34 percent of people aged 50 to 64.
Men are more likely to post something they later regret. Fifteen percent (15%) of male respondents said they posted something regrettable, compared with 8 percent of female respondents.
Possibly proving that with age comes wisdom, young adults were more likely to post something regrettable than their older counterparts. Fifteen percent of social network users aged 18 to 29 said they have posted something regrettable. Only 5 percent of people over 50 said the same thing.
Pew’s phone survey of 2,277 adults was conducted in April and May 2011. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. The data about teens came from a separate phone survey Pew conducted with teenagers and their parents.
By Barbara Ortutay ~ The Associated Press
Understand the difference between a “backup contract” vs “multiple contract”
Most short sale addenda have provisions for backup offers if your Realtor checks the appropriate box. It is the opinion of Berlin-Patten Attorneys that, generally speaking, your Realtor should not check the box permitting backup offers when dealing with a short sale. It creates too many unnecessary legal and practical issues.
Most importantly, many lenders and their automated systems (such as Equator) will not allow two contracts to be under review simultaneously. As such, once a second contract is presented to the lender, the time frames run anew with that second contract. Moreover it has been have found that the two buyers are not adequately counseled with respect to the implications of permitting two or more contracts, and it is the attorney’s universal experience that one buyer will be very unhappy (sometimes to the point of legal threats) when all is said and done. In other words, the buyer with the lower offer will obviously have an issue if a higher offer is subsequently submitted to the lender. As such, if the seller is going to entertain more than one contract, they had better do so very carefully, with proper legal counsel, and with adequate disclosure.
There are also significant legal considerations. For example, one needs to understand the difference between “backup” contracts and “multiple” contracts. There is a significant legal distinction, a distinction that is important to understand when encouraging more than one contract for the same property at the same time. A backup contract is just that, a contract that is clearly subordinate to a prior contract. It contains a backup contract addendum or similar verbiage that makes it clearly subject to a prior contract. If, however, two contracts are executed for the same property, and neither contains a backup contract addendum or similar verbiage, this is a multiple contract situation and potentially creates significant legal liability to not only the seller, but the realtors as well. You cannot have two valid contracts for the same property without backup language in one of them.
As such, we strongly encourage any party who is considering the execution of more than one contract to consult with an attorney to determine (a) is it the best thing to do under the circumstances, (b) do they have the right to do so, (c) is the prior contract still in full force and effect, (d) if so, does it permit backup contracts, and (e) is adequate backup contract language contained within the second contract. Each of these decisions carry significant timing, factual and legal implications, and should not be taken lightly.
Information provided by Berlin-Patten, PLLC, Attorneys at Law
