Waiting For Your Home Buyer To Get Financing
Until you are selling your home and you are in the midst of this experience you really have no idea how frustrating it can be. I am talking about the lengthy wait when buyers have applied for conventional financing and they are in the process of providing all the documentation required by their lender.
As most agents will tell you, it can easily take six weeks or more before you know if your buyers have qualified for their mortgage. That can be the longest six weeks of your life, or at least it can feel like it. The only alternatives to this nearly interminable, frustrating wait are to hold out for a buyer who can pay cash (not a common occurrence) or to provide seller financing yourself. A buyer with cash is a dream buyer, really.
A buyer with cash is what you really want most of all when you’re selling your home, but unless you are not in any hurry at all, it’s impractical to demand cash. You can certainly call investors who pay cash for homes. That is what I do on a regular basis. But if you intend to sell to a homeowner who is willing to pay a market price for your home, that is when you’d better face up to the fact that you may be playing the waiting game for many weeks after you get the purchase agreement signed.
Just assume everything will turn out fine and do nothing, and then assume that you really don’t know how the sale will turn out and keep showing your home in the meantime, just in case your first buyer doesn’t come through. As you have probably guessed by now, I vote for number two.
I always suggest that you keep your home on the market even though you’re waiting for a buyer to qualify for financing when you’re selling your home. Here are a couple points to ponder, in the event your find yourself in this situation or you are talking to other people who are in this situation themselves.
First, you generally have nothing to lose to put in a back-up offer because the earnest money check will not be cashed unless the prior sale falls apart. (Check this out with your local agent.) And second, if a prior sale falls apart after an inspection and appraisal were performed on the home, you may have access to the information and valuation when you sell a home.
Those can be very valuable to you as a buyer. Both these things being true, you can see why an agent should be persuaded if necessary to keep your home on the market, too. When you are selling your home you want to use every possible advantage to close a sale as soon as possible.