Yesterday we had our open house as planned, but I had a few brain cells anxiously awaiting to receive the offer we had been promised. It was a really awful day, cold, raining, but we still had a decent turn out – 11 parties. One family attended with their agent, let’s call them the Anderson’s and their agent Anne.
After the open house, I checked my email, and there was the offer from the Johnson’s who saw the house on Friday. Their real estate agent, let’s call him John, kindly summarized the terms for me on his cover page. The fantastic news is that it is a full price offer. The bad news is the contingency. They want to sell their house first. Ugh. 
Last evening, I got a call from Anne. Her clients, the Anderson’s, want to see the house one more time then make an offer. She says they have been looking at houses for two years (!) and that finally found “the one”. My house. 
So you may be wondering how to handle this? I, of course, leveled with Anne, because I like to be as honest as possible in all my dealings and it is in my best interest to do so. I told her we already had a full price offer with a contingency. I could have hidden this but didn’t for several reasons. Now the Anderson’s know they have competition and they will have to do better than full price with contingency. I was interested if they would still want to proceed knowing this, and they do. Good sign. They will be here tomorrow (Tuesday) morning. Meanwhile, their in-laws stopped by today to give their approval. (They LOVED it.) I’ve told Anne I need the offer in by Tuesday evening so I could respond in a timely manner to John and the Johnson’s.
Then I sent John the following email:
“Hi John, My husband and I have reviewed the offer from the Johnson’s. Of course, full price is wonderful – it doesn’t get any better than that! It looks from their financials and job stability that they should not have any trouble obtaining financing, a huge plus. However, we have great concerns about the contingency of the sale of their house. Obviously, this takes us off the market for the next six weeks, six prime weeks in the height of the best selling season, with no guarantee of a sale. We will need to think long and hard about this and would like until Wednesday to respond further. We are expecting another offer tomorrow which we want to review before making our next move, too. Thank you for your consideration, and I’ll be in touch sometime on Wednesday.”
This morning I looked up the Johnson’s current house (the one they need to sell before they can buy ours) on Realtor.com and couldn’t find it. Uh-oh. It turns out they haven’t even got their house on the market yet. This further weakens their case. If they were under contract or had a lot of interest on their house, their offer would have sounded a lot better. But it could take a L-O-N-G time (as in Long and Foster) for them to sell their house.
So not much to do at this point until the second offer comes in. I will keep you posted!
P.S. ALL NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED JUST BECAUSE.
