It's one of those reasons we blog -- for the off-chance that our words may make a difference to someone...
About a year-and-a-half ago, I wrote about an agent who called me with a verbal offer on one of my listings, saying he didn't want to waste his time writing the offer. I was puzzled at the time, wondering why anyone would do that. The subject came up again a couple of months ago from a reader who wondered if it was okay for her agent to make a verbal offer to a builder.
The reader and her husband were willing to get a pre-approval letter and to write an earnest money deposit, but their agent thought it might make them appear too anxious. (I know...what???) Anyway I got curious last week and asked her what had happened with their home-buying adventure.
She wrote back with the following:
About 3 or 4 days after our realtor put in our 2nd offer...verbally, my husband and I went into the sales office alone to see if they had other homes. We found out from the sales agent our dream house was sold, and she [had] called our realtor about the other offer (but she never called to tell us). About another week went by without hearing from her, so I sent her an email telling her we were going to continue our search on our own and no longer required her assistance. She responded very unprofessionally and rudely, but I expected that from her.
Weeks went by with our stress level rising, our lease coming to an end, and running out of houses to look at. We kept broadening our search but every time something we'd be willing to look at came up- it would be under contract, or we'd see it in person and it would be trashed.
One day we went back to the sales office where we put in the other offer to see if they had any other homes available. They had one so we checked it out. This one was even nicer but was more expensive. As we were getting desperate and we loved this new house (which was above what we wanted to spend) we decided to just put in a low offer. I typed up everything we wanted (add study, fix this fix that, pay closing etc) and went up there with my check book. I left feeling pretty good. 3 hours later I got a call that had me almost jumping through the roof. They accepted our offer.
So, we're closing in about 1 month. Its a brand new house with everything we wanted and more, and we got it for about 30k under their asking price.
I owe you a big thank you for writing that blog about verbal offers. It is what really got me thinking about ditching our realtor, and had we not done that- who knows what would have happened. So, again thank you so much for your advice. We're extremely excited to move into our first house.
The warm feeling this email gave me will carry me through the whole year.
(C) Susan Pruden. | 
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