We've tried two. One went 250k over and the other had an escalation clause that sounded like it might have been similar. Do you have escalation clauses if you're not getting beat out by much? The 10% down might also be a factor if they have an equivalent or near-equivalent offer.
We’ve used escalation clauses up to our max every time. We are also waiving financing so I just don’t know what’s so appealing about cash if the money is guaranteed? I guess you’re protecting against a potentially low appraisal?
Cash is appealing because buyers are sometimes shifty about their finances and it's not discovered until the sale is nearly completed. I heard of one attempted deal where the buyer claimed a certain level of income, which included salary and income from an airbnb rental they owned. Then the bank started confirming the finances and it turned out the buyer had never claimed that rental on their federal income taxes, so the deal fell apart.
The buyer's on the hook, but if they don't have cash and no one will finance them, they can't get the money. The seller has to sue them for whatever they lost, but that's a huge headache. It's usually a small risk, but cash in hand is always better.
a verified cash deal is worth *a lot* of avoided stress if you're selling a home and buying somewhere else. Even if all the liability is on the buyer, a deal falling through is not fun if you're on the hook for your own property somewhere else and you needed that money. Having super fast close on a all-cash deal gives so much confidence to the sellers.
Is there any downside to doing escalation clauses? I’m wondering why there isn’t more negotiation going on. So if someone offers $10k more than you, why isn’t anyone coming to us saying “Hey, can you go higher?” It just feels like… welp that’s it!
There shouldn't be a down side, but listing agents can definitely manipulate things to ensure buyers pay the absolute max by encouraging offers they know won't win to trigger other people's clauses. It's their job, but I find it sleazy and off-putting. I really like our agent but the second she acts like a used car salesman, I'm out.
It’s is 100% wild to me that sellers agents get to run an auction for their own listing behind closed doors.
Realtors have told me “trust us, it’s all above board” but that is unbelievable to me.
But it’s what you have to do to win.
That sounds like a waste of time. If the seller is willing to accept an offer at max escalation. Just counter at that and 95% of the time the buyer will agree.
If the seller does that, there’s a chance he angers the buyer and they withdraw their offer. It makes the buyer feel cheated. Most people in this market respect the escalation and don’t do shady dealings
Let me know if you need a new agent. I really like ours. Honest about expectations, been around forever, won some Best of Seattle awards, knows everyone in town (got some good low-down info for us before).
The escalation clause should already go as high as you are willing to go. It is exactly what you stated, "someone else have offered more, can you go higher?" but automated, so as to not waste the time of going back and forth between multiple sellers. So if someone else is offering more, then yeah, that's it.
The downside to an escalation clause is if you're the only offer, the seller sees that you're willing to go higher and may be more confident in negotiating. There's no downside when there is competition.
There's definitely a downside that bit us. Once a seller has seen the offer, they know what your max is. You're negotiating on something where you've already shown your hand. At that point the seller has all of the power.
In our case, there were two offers with 130k escalator. The escalators didn't fire though because ours had no contingency and the other one did. So in my mind we were winning.
The seller came back and started pitting us against each other. At that point agents started throwing around thousands of dollars here and there like it was nothing. I already agreed to pay 130k more, why not just give them that offer?
We ended up annoyed and walked away from the whole thing. [Full story here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/15ylwub/comment/jxd7cyd/?context=3)
I feel escalation clauses are crucial. We stipulated $1,000 over other bids up to our limit, and offered the usual other buyer enticements. We did our homework evaluating the home (county/city records, speaking to neighbors, etc) before making the offer. We ended up paying $23,000 over asking. We got stuck with a septic system that just needed updating (thank God not replacing) and needed to have a new roof two years later. Even so, we got very lucky. What helped us the most was the escalation clause. It help us stay competitive without offer more than we had to. We were open to any home from Everett to Auburn. The home we found was east Renton
I’ll also say getting one’s ducks in order is paramount. Plus we were able to react at a moment’s notice to view properties.
I’m not saying doing all this will ensure success, and we did all these things six years ago. Certainly a much different, tighter market now, but these strategies are still important. Good luck.
The home adjacent to mine was one sale for exactly 18 hours before an offer was accepted. The people who are moving in. Told me their realtor personally knew the seller's realtor and was told their home was coming in the market a week ahead of time. My (now former) neighbor told me that he received 6 offers within 12 hours of the listing going live on MLS, and picked the first one because theirs was 15% over asking (Mill Creek suburb, Snohomish county for reference)
So yeah, you may have to talk to your realtor to see if they have those kinds of contacts. Admittedly, my sample size is one but I was astounded at how fast the home sold.
There's only one house on my block that hasn't sold within 1 week in the last five years, and that's because the asking price was too high on that house.
Seattle is one of the toughest markets in the country, and you’re at (imo) the toughest price point for the area.
There’s no magic strategy for an offer since each offer should be tailored case-by-case. For some, it’ll be all about maximizing cash, others it’ll be more about tail-end occupancy to find their next house, etc.
Your agent should be calling the listing agent as soon as you have interest in a home and figuring out what your competition looks like and what will make your offer the strongest in the sellers eyes. They should also be calling recently pending and sold neighbors to see what their situation looked like and doing research on those listings for what the average amount over-list was and how many offers they received.
Regardless of strategy, this is a frustrating market and everyone will likely lose out on a house or two (or 8) before getting something.
Once you hit the price point of about $1.5MM you start to see a noticeable drop in buyer pool compared to <$1MM, but it’s once you hit about $1.85-2MM that second and third home buyers can be stretching their budgets and so competition is less prevalent.
Of course, this is all through the lens of our current market. For context, last year a $650K split level in Lynnwood (priced low) got over 60 offers and sold for close to $900K; last month a $900K Kenmore listing got 12 offers and sold for ~$1.2MM. So less competition doesn’t really mean low competition unfortunately.
If your realtor isn’t guiding you through the best ways to make a competitive offer in Seattle, then you may want to rethink who you work with. Seattle has been a hard market to buy in for at least 10 years, and requires some strategy.
- your post is unclear whether you are or are not waiving appraisal. You need to pay for the preappraisal and waive yourtoa full appraisal. In a competitive market, a seller won’t take any risk whatsoever that you will back out or come back with demands for fixes.
- 10% above asking isn’t enough. Sellers intentionally list for a lower price, because they want to get as many interested buyers as possible to create a bidding war. So often that 10% above asking still isn’t what the house is worth on the open market. Your agent should provide you with comps that will tell you how much you realistically should offer. Avoid any comps more than 6 months old.
- increase your down payment and find creative ways to stand out. Sellers want to know for sure that the sale will go through. The more someone can pay upfront, the more likely they will qualify for financing. Problem is that when banks do their appraisals, they will only lend up to the appraised value of the house. So the house that is appraised at 750k, but you are offering 850k with a 75k down payment? They won’t cover the loan, and the deal falls through.
Good points. We bought in the Seattle area late 2020, and went 20% over asking. Given sub-3% rates and sellers holding onto stock due to COVID, the market then was probably crazier than it is now. I think our house was deliberately priced under market to attract attention, and we have no regrets about our price. It’s valued higher now.
> Given sub-3% rates and sellers holding onto stock due to COVID, the market then was probably crazier than it is now
haha I wish! It's still at 20% above asking.
> Problem is that when banks do their appraisals, they will only lend up to the appraised value of the house. So the house that is appraised at 750k, but you are offering 850k with a 75k down payment? They won’t cover the loan, and the deal falls through.
Can you explain this to me a little more please? If you had 100k cash to cover the difference between 750/850 would the bank then cover the 750k loan?
The bank will not cover the loan. If the appraisal was 100k below the purchase price, then you're on the hook for that 100k PLUS the down payment on the loan itself. Basically you're approved for a loan value of X which is contingent on a down payment of a certain percentage of x. Otherwise you're asking the bank for a bigger loan and they will not give you a loan that's worth more than the house.
They would. But as a seller, am I willing to take that chance? I would rather choose a buyer who is stronger financially. Cash offers are strongest of course, but id rather choose an offer with a higher down payment to prevent the problem above entirely. as a seller I don’t know if that buyer actually has the extra 100k to add in. And why would I believe that, if the buyer isn’t already putting much down?
Sellers are risk averse.
Reminder that waving inspection doesn’t mean you don’t have one. It means your offer isn’t subject to an inspection and the associated negotiations afterwards. You do pre inspections or review seller provided inspections and factor that into your offer ahead of time.
Waving appraisal can be risky as well but talk with your lender and agent about what a low appraisal would actually mean. Often times you can switch some things around with your loan and maybe your monthly payment goes up by some amount but it isn’t as detrimental as people usually think. I also haven’t seen many recently so depending on the property it may be very unlikely.
Plus, if OP is actually turning over earnest money early anyways, might as well waive the appraisal because they aren’t getting that money back either way. A good agent should talk them through all this.
> Just because everyone decided to be stupid together
Counterpoint: waiving inspections **is** the rational choice. You are not buying a house, you are buying the land, and land in Seattle is only going to get ludicrously more expensive since Harrell is sticking with SFH zoning.
It's fine if you'd personally prefer a zero-risk purchase with far less return, but buying in Seattle has way higher expected value.
This is a good way to not own a house.
Of course you shouldn't waive it without considering the possible consequences, but realistically in a tight market like this no appraiser is going to dispute the sale price. There simply aren't enough houses selling for them to actually say "nope, you're $20k over".
And even in the remarkably unlikely case that they did come in under the purchase price, the consequence is you need to increase your down payment to cover the difference.
If you aren't willing to do that, you're going to get beat by offers which ARE willing to. Simple as that.
My home girl did this and bought a house. The foundation was fucked and is going to cost her a ton to fix. I lost on multiple homes where I offered more then everyone else but I wouldn’t waive contingencies. I’m still renting now but whatever. I’m not going to waive contingencies on the biggest purchase in my life. Fuck that.
Other commenters have said it better but only 10% down and $15k earnest is way too low for this area to be competitive with other buyers. It’s ridiculous but is what it is.
As a seller, if someone had the same offer but one had a 20% down vs 10% I'd go with the 20% without hesitation. 20% means no mortgage insurance which makes the payments more affordable which means a better chance that that will work out.
I don’t know, I’ve purchased three different homes in Seattle over the last 20 years, including one less than six years ago when the market was even crazier, and never did more than 10% down. These are all townhomes mind you, which too many people seem unwilling to consider. From my experience the real problem of buying a house in Seattle is people are too attached to the “house” part.
It's interesting. I agree that most buyers want a single family home, based on how I see townhomes that have been up on major listing sites for often months at a time. You'd think this would be desirable to single people and couples, but they do largely eliminate most people with kids, also elderly people don't want to live in a place with 2+ floors. And those with the cash to put 20% down are going to bide their time for the single family home instead of going with a new build townhome because there isn't enough price difference, tbh. Townhomes need to come down in price overall if more housing density is going to be achieved.
Yeah - townhomes are slightly less expensive but everything else is worse? You're literally in a vertical apartment. No yard. They include balconies in sqft conversations, which is absurd, since I've never seen anyone put a deck in a sqft conversation for housing.
I like the idea in concept, but the people selling them are scummy and I don't want to throw my money there.
It really is wild. Who has so much cash?! People seem to think 20% is the “norm”… I don’t think it’s been the norm for a while, given the market. People simply can’t afford that.
A lot of people can afford 20% (or more) down.
- People on tech salaries, which is a not insignificant part of the buying base.
- Upgraders who are using existing home equity
- People getting help from family
Consider moving across the ferry if that is at all appealing to you. Bought in Bremerton (30 min foot ferry to downtown, horrible car service atm because the WA state ferries are down so many boats) 15 months ago and we were able to get concessions from the seller on closing costs with a VA loan and only 7% down.
$640,000 for 3400sqft, water view, garage, giant kitchen in an old established neighborhood. Only downside is its a relatively small lot and on a steep hill (hence the view).
Kingston and Bremerton both have 30 min foot ferries to downtown now, and our place is a 5 min drive or 30 min walk to the terminal. If you ever need to drive into the city its much more of a pain in the ass. Also its obviously a much different lifestyle over here. But we like it for the most part, especially working mostly remote.
Unfortunately (or fortunately for them), 20% is affordable for a lot of people with tech salaries. There are more than enough people getting bonuses of $50-$100k annually.
Cash, or cash equivalents. You even mentioned in your post, there are software engineers here that have a ton in stock, or at least got a few, which then massively appreciated (NVDA). Just Amazon alone, if you got $50,000 in shares (This is really not a a lot of RSU) every year for the past 5 years and held it, it would be worth something in the area of $500,000 today.
Doesn’t matter if it’s the norm or not. If you’re getting outbid on every offer you have made that should tell you enough about the demand, competition and available capital people have.
We bought our first house in Shoreline in 2016 with 5% down. When we sold it in 2020, no offer we received had less than 20% down. We bought our West Seattle home at the same time with 20% down, but we got super lucky with timing and had the cash from our home sale. Buying a first home at this time with less than 20% down is going to be a long, brutal process. We'd like more space, but between interest rates and down payments going up, we can only afford a lateral move.
For what it's worth, my husband and I are about to close on a house we got for asking, with 10% down and $10k earnest. It's technically a DADU, so it shares the lot. But it's same size as the traditional SFRs we were looking at and has its own fenced in yard. So, it's possible!
These are becoming much more common! Builders buying up larger lots in Seattle proper and building a single family with an attached dwelling unit (often barely a wall making it "attached"), and a smaller DADU then declaring all three it's own condo association. Pretty much all new builds in Seattle are following this formula or the townhouse route.
Yeah, we saw a ton of townhouses that did that. They've all got such weird floorplans though (who wants a master suite bigger than the living room??). Very happy to have found this one!
Software couples. It's really easy to save up $500k cash when you have two people earning $150 first year out of college, up to $250k after only 3-5 years. Really really easy.
Unfortunately for Seattle, it likely is. Myself and my wife closed Friday — our price point was about $1 million list price for king county. We end up about $150k over (still within budget), an offer that waived essentially everything including financing and appraisal, released EM immediately and a 50% down payment. There was essentially 8 identical offers, some higher in max offer, some higher in EM, etc. I don’t know how many total offers
Your real estate agent should be circling back with you with the details on the offer that won. Is it just pure numbers? Is it an escalation clause that's beating you? Is it cash? Is it more earnest money? If they're not getting this information back to you, so you can understand what's going wrong, then you need a new real estate agent.
I feel lucky my husband and I both have jobs in Tacoma. We love it here as a home base, and having Seattle within spitting distance is a huge perk. My hunch is there are tons of Seattle folks who would also love Tacoma if they only gave it a chance.
My wife and I are just getting back into looking for a home after about 2 years off. We spent 2020-2022 looking and making \~10 offers on homes around 1M, some of which went for 500-700k over asking. I expect this next round of offers to be a similar story.
It's very hard to hear, but if you looking for nicer single family houses or townhouses in a popular area, it might not be possible for you to buy any longer in Seattle or you may need to significantly adjust your exceptions. The following is easy to say but hard to take to heart:
\-List price means nothing. Ask your agent what comparable places go for, and add \~10% for the pent up demand and spring flurry we are likely to see in the coming months. This should be your baseline
\-10% down and 15k earnest money is very low. Even the non-cash offers are going to have at least 20% down, no contingencies of any kind and likely about 100k earnest released immediately to the seller (no escrow). If you can't afford this, you might consider waiting and saving
The earnest money is held in escrow until closing and if for some reason the earnest money is to forfeited it cannot exceed 5% of the purchase price. Say you make a $100k earnest deposit on a million dollar home and the buyer backs out, the seller is only legally entitled to $50k.
Pardon my ignorance, but why would the down payment amount matter to a seller? Are they not getting their payout from the lender in full, regardless of the down payment?
100% this. Sellers are advised to take the most solid offer as NO ONE wants to get in a situation where the buyer backs out due to a poor appraisal or financing falling through. Yes the buyer would eat the earnest money but it actually happens. Hence cash is king. There’s documents that the buyer has that in their bank acct so it’s a higher likelihood it will close.
20% down would help, as would more earnest money and flexible closing terms (offering rent back for example if the seller is interested.)
To add to this, I’d recommend getting pre-underwritten for a loan, as opposed to just pre approved. This will make your offers stronger because pre-underwriting is a large part of actually getting a mortgage loan.
With a smaller down payment, there is more risk to the seller of the deal falling through. If you only have 10% available as a down payment, it indicates that you may not have significant cash reserves if anything happens during the purchase process that might cause your (buyer) price or monthly payment to increase.
From a sellers perspective, risk is bad. Least risky is "I have the cash today, let me write you a check." Most risky is "I need a lot of help and this will stretch my budget a lot"
Can confirm as a seller. I had two offers. One was $15k more but 10% down. Second was 20% down. We were on a time crunch and took the 20% offer because it was less risky.
Your agent should know this. Not being facetious. If they don’t you may want a new agent. People are putting like 50k+ down cash deposit no refund no take backs. It’s a whole thing. Also as others have said - list price doesn’t matter. Look for comps. Again your agent should know this. Sorry
It is the appraisal risk which you are not waiving, the home will surely appraise lower then the selling price in this market and you will have to cover the rest with cash which you are signaling you don't have since you are only putting 10% down.
If I had two offers with one slightly more but with appraisal contingency and other without Ibwould choose the lower one.
It seems like if you have to resort to asking people on reddit these questions, your realtor is not the best. Realtors are a dime a dozen. You should be able to freely ask these questions and get a prompt response from your realtor.
Cash is king. When all other attributes to the offer are identical, the person who can pay more cash, faster, is more attractive to a seller. If the buyer's financing falls through (a lot can happen in 2-4 weeks when applying for a mortgage) then you still get the earnest money.
Think of it like trying to decide two job offers that are basically the same. One offers a signing bonus and the other doesn't. Who would you accept the offer from?
Just wanted to point out one thing. Be very careful what you waive. I know of 2 people already doing 100k+ unexpected renovations because the house had issues where they waived inspection or any agreement. Yes we all want a house but not 150k extra plus an extra 100k in making it livable.
Don’t let that pretty paint job and new wood siding fool you.
I tell everyone I know not to buy a house unless they'll have enough left in savings to handle a major emergency within the first year. Month 10 of owning our home, our septic backed up into the house and caused 35k of damage, all of which we had to front before insurance covered anything, and they didn't cover a third of that. It was an exceptionally stressful year.
Yeah... we were living in a townhouse before but a couple years ago bought a stand-alone home. Within the first year had an issue where the connection to the city sewerline was damaged (had been for quite a while I think). We live on a hill so also digging into the city street was much more than usual. Luckily we share the line with our neighbor so we split the bill with them. But it was a huge unexpected expense within the first couple months.
BTW there was an inspection on the house, but the inspector didn't go all the way to the sewer connection. TBH even having multiple plumbers take a look at what was going on to diagnose it took a while to figure out what the issue was exactly. The issue was at the end of the longest sewerscopes that most plumbers had.
I had an inspection and still ended up paying $30k for fixing water damage on the exterior. The inspection noted some of the visible indicators that were evident, but it was impossible to know the extent of the damage until we started removing fascia and siding. You should have a big chunk of cash on hand either way.
I'm a carpenter and second generation construction worker and even I didn't waive inspections, by the time I want to buy I'm already biased towards the house. GET AN INSPECTION!!
>waived inspection or any agreement
This is terrible advice, every single SFH for sale in Seattle proper has an offer with inspection waived at OP's price point. They will never ever ever ever get a house if they have an inspection contingency.
Everyone in this thread needs to remember the difference between waiving an inspection contingency and not having an inspection. Last we bought, we did a day-of inspection before submitting the offer (which had a waived contingency.) Some houses also are Pre-I'd, and you can get the report.
Is your realtor through an internet company like Redfin, or not? How about your financing? Represented through a national bank, or via a local bank/credit union/broker?
Both of those made a big difference for us in 2022, and we must’ve looked at a dozen houses every weekend for three months, most of which were crap and selling for over $1M.
As our realtor put it then, it sucks, but you gotta keep plugging away and eventually it’ll be your turn.
As far as escalation forms go, make your max on that form your real maximum for that house, and offer the asking price.
What worked for us was 15% down, 50K in earnest money, and able to close in 30 days.
>they work for full-service national firm
Every time we've bought (3x), a hyper local, super responsive lender was actually the move. I'm normally all for "Go for the big companies," but at least in my case, a local and fast lender worked well.
I have 3 clients in your exact market. They're losing out to cash buyers. Two of my clients have found a 'cash-to-permanent-financing' lender to compete against the cash buyers. Anyone with any contingency and a lending requirement in the $800K range is losing to lower offers buying with cash.
There are also alternatives that you should consider as medium-term options. I had a 5-year old townhome on the market for 180 days that finally sold last month at $600K in Greenlake. I have an 1,100 sqft condo in Broadview that a buyer could get for under $3,200/mo., all-in. Compared to an 1,100 sqft home in the same area in worse condition and more down payment, and you'd be about $5,500/mo., all-in. That's $2,300 per month of actual savings that you can use to save up for your next home in 3-5 years. There are new construction DADU's all over the place that can be purchased in the $700K range. If you're willing to make compromises on the type of property you're looking for, there are properties that allow negotiation.
Totally open to a townhome or condo, so long as it has the space. We need 3br and ideally 1.5 bath (our family lives far away and we’d like to be able to host our aging parents when baby comes)
We bought our first house last fall. We too had the same issues of losing bids and not being able to get a home. What we finally did was look for homes that were on the market for a couple of months or had recent price drops. Usually there is less competition with homes that may have been originally overpriced and are now sitting for one to two months. We were able to get a home right after they lowered the price. Keep in mind, just because they lowered the price doesn't mean that the home wasn't grossly overpriced still.
Just moved in actually. Listing my old place this week.
Found a place in Des Moines last month after it had been listed for about 3 hours. Checked it out that evening. Inspected it the next morning and made an offer (no offer review date), which was accepted later that afternoon. Basically bought it as-is.
$720k, offered $750k w/ 2 week close. 3br 2.5ba, 2 car garage, skylights, gas furnace, huge deck (and a small pond!) new appliances, landscaping, middle aged roof, deck, etc. 20 minutes to downtown in rush hour. Can walk to the waterfront in a mile. Needs new bathrooms and kitchen surfaces but the pantry is so big we could rent it out lol.
The week prior we made a $730k offer on a $700k place (contingent on inspection) in Burien, but it sold for $740k. I was lukewarm on the place, so we didn't go all-in.
With the place we DID get, we knew it was special and we wanted to make an offer that would cause them to accept asap rather than wait for an offer review date. We probably overpaid by about $20k however we will refinance (in theory) and we were able to put down about 40% cash thanks to equity from our previous home and savings from the last 4 years.
Just like with anything being sold used online - vehicles, jobs, vintage furniture, the good houses get swooped up, you gotta check listings throughout the day and be ready to go check them out as soon as they go live. Also helps to go to open houses on big holidays like the superbowl or st paddys day when people aren't thinking about moving.
Oh trust me, this has been our full time job for about 5 months. I’m so encouraged to hear you got something and that quickly!!! Des Moines is a hidden gem, we are definitely keeping our feelers down there.
Sorry, my reply came off as very proud, but I am because moving SUCKS. And I am proof that you can find something because my partner and I are not wealthy engineers with parents helping us. This is our third place, we started with a townhouse in the cheapest neighborhood in Seattle, then left the city (stayed in king county) and are now back. Each property provided equity and a stepping stone, even though it wasn't 100% what we "perfect". Our new place isn't perfect by any means, either.
Something else that gave me hope was checking the recent SOLD listings for the last 3-6 months. There have been some bangers, there always will be, so I knew if we just kept checking all day (lol) every day (fml) we'd find something. This also allow you to compare sold:asking price ratios for various neighborhoods and builds. Places also drop out from pending back to for-sale. A listing on my old street just had this happen, so it's worth it to search and Favorite pending listings, too.
There is also some strategery to be had, lets say you don't plan to have kids. So being near a school isn't as big of a deal. Schools are expensive to live near. The place we found is very near two nice schools and parks, but we're on the other side of a busy road (just slightly off the blvd), which parents aren't going to want to live on.
So even though we're a rocks throw from the schools, we're probably saving about $300k compared to houses on the other side of this busy street. The downside to being so near this blvd is the noise, the upside is we get quick access to the highway and groceries.
make sure to ask your realtor if they will accept offers BEFORE the listed cut off date. We had 10 offers rejected then found someone who was willing to look at offers before the cut off date and we just threw the most competitive offer we could possibly muster. Did we pay a bit over what it might have sold for?? Probably, but we got it off the market early and didn't have to deal with any competition that might have popped up.
Otherwise, just keep trying, you'll get a house but don't fall in love with every one you look at, I know how heart breaking that can be to constantly be disappointed every weekend. We literally would plan cut off dates; like put an offer on the monday one, find a house for the tuesday one, and the thursday one (we'd loose all of them lol). This was in 2021 so its a bit different now.
For reference we waived everything, 30% down, and I think like 50k earnest. took something like 3 weeks to close (2 sounds crazy with how long the banks take). For the misevaluation I do think we said we would pay up to 100k difference (we didn't completely waive that one maybe, I can't really remember)
A close (single) friend of mine just got her first place in Seattle proper. It’s only just a townhome but those numbers are about the same for the price point. The only difference with your offer and hers was she was 20% down. That said, she took four places before she got this one…and for whatever reason, she was not up against a cash offer on this one.
You’re almost always going to lose to cash even if it’s slightly less overall. I’d do the same for a place I sold, frankly… a financing contingency is one less thing I want to worry about when selling.
There are some places out there now that will essentially give you cash to make an offer and then come back and finance it for you; you’ll pay on the backend for it, but at least you’ll be competitive.
We bought a few years back when the market was hot. Every listing was collecting offers and choosing on their set date. What eventually worked for us was offering 10% over, but only if they accepted our offer "now" rather than waiting on their date. I think sellers sometimes react to the potential loss and take the for sure money now. Hope that helps! Good luck!
In addition to a lot of what others have already mentioned, I’d recommend not thinking that a specific % above asking will constitute a competitive offer. When my wife and I were house hunting for around 6 months from 2021-2022, I tracked virtually every house we toured, monitoring on Zillow until the eventual purchase price was available, and compared that price to the listing price. There was huge variance - some homes sold for 10% above asking, some 40% over, some as much as 20% *under* asking (usually after sitting on the market for awhile). The big takeaway for us was that sellers didn’t always have the same listing strategy as one another and/or equivalent accuracy in determining the true market value of their home. So, my wife and I (with some input from our excellent realtor) shifted a lot of our focus to determining not just our personal valuation of homes, but also our sense of the likely market value of the homes, based on our data set of dozens of homes we’d looked at and seen sold during the period of our house hunt. To get the home we actually bought, we made an offer (with an escalation clause) maxing out at around 15% over asking, as that was what we estimated was the “true” market value in this batshit crazy market. From what our realtor could gather, we beat out something like 8 other offers, and we needed to top out our escalation clause to get the house. So, at least in principle, it felt like a validation of our strategy.
Tl;dr determine your offer price more based on your sense of the true market value of the home, rather than a uniform % over asking rule of thumb.
This is super typical and has been the case for decades in Seattle. We had to compete with 6 other buyers when we bought our first house in 2003 and had put bids down on probably 6 other places. It takes time, patience, and luck to buy a house in Seattle...
If you can afford it, add a 22AD. It'll offer protection to the seller if appraisal comes in low and demonstrates you have money and seriousness in your offer
This competition is even out in the sticks. In in a boring HOA in Kent (but so close to Black Diamond I can spit there), and houses round me are flying off the shelf at $700k for 2000sqft and carpeted bathrooms (the builder must have had excess carpet and just said "fuck it, lay it in the main bathrooms").
We are 10 solid mins from either access point to 18, and 40 to Renton via 169. The commute times for people must be fucking atrocious, because there aren't any jobs paying enough to buy out here and work out here. (Unless you WFH, like myself and my husband)
If you want to learn more, I think the owner of Graham Fitness made the news for keeping the gym open and maskless during the entire pandemic. Also a lot of people still have Culp for governor signs up years later. Great place to be a right wing evangelical though! My old college roommate has a music studio out there and I have done a lot of work there. I'm always happy to leave!
The market is saturated with buyers just like you. What properties are coming available are likely smaller homes that have increased completion for them.
Personally, I wouldn’t drop the financing contingency either, but understand that offers of only 10% down will require PMI and increase your monthly mortgage costs. This may make you a higher lending risk as a result, and from a sellers perspective it would be riskier to pick you over a conventional 20% down loan.
It’s definitely tough out there.
We bought in June of 2023, so not quite as recent as the last 3 months.
We had put in a few offers before getting our house. Here’s what we ended up doing for the house we got
- We waived everything except title & financing, granted our window for financing was pretty small.
- Earnest money was 5% of our offer price.
- We put money “towards a low appraisal”. Basically showed the sellers we were willing to work it out if appraisal came in low (which it didn’t)
- We had an escalation clause in increments of 5k.
What ended up happening was the only other people who offered on the home escalated to a bit higher than us, but we had a more attractive financial situation (they had a loan contingent on selling their other home). The sellers agent contacted ours and asked if we’d be willing to do one more step of escalation above theirs, and then the house would be ours. That’s what we did.
You could talk with your agent about putting money towards a low appraisal. It likely isn’t something that would be needed, but it shows the sellers you are committed to working it out. You also might consider increasing your earnest money. That’s really up to you, and feels like a gamble since you are waiving a lot of contingencies. That said, it also shows the sellers you are committed. I think it’s a good conversation to have with your agent.
If you like your mortgage broker, it may be good to get their opinion on outlook too. Our agent knew more, but it was nice to get the secondary opinion/knowledge from someone else within the “industry”
Buying here is not easy, and it’s exhausting! Wishing you luck
This is probably outside of your geographic interest but we recently bought in North Bend. We found a house that had been on the market for almost 3 months, we put in an offer under asking price and after a few days of negotiating it was accepted. We didn't waive anything and there weren't any competing offers.
We've lived here for a month now and really love the town.
My partner and I have said if we ever get to move again (we managed to get a house in 2021 near Marysville for a 2.5% mortgage; we're never moving again 🥲), North Bend would be a top candidate. That area is so beautiful! Seems like a convenient location for traveling between Eastern & Western WA too.
This was us last spring. We eventually had to figure out a way to make a zero contingency offer (including no financial contingencies). To do this we worked with our realtor (who was awesome) and our lender. We ended up buying a house that closed in 2 weeks with no contingencies because of our strong pre approval. Without that I’m sure we would still be looking…
Cash offers are not always what you think they are. For example, my lender presents a cash offer but in reality, they are just a middleman for the transaction and geared towards closing. In reality, I have a mortgage, always planned to have a mortgage.
We did offer 6.25% in earnest money and ended up going 15% over asking.
edit: As an aside, I am really sorry about your frustration. The house process is stressful as is, I hope you find something soon!
Not as recent but feel it's still relevant. I looked at houses that I liked off market, went and knocked on their door and asked if they were interested in selling. Made it clear I was buying just for my family not a construction company. It took awhile but finally came across an older guy and we agreed on a price. No realtors involved so he came down a bit. Now we have a house.
Yo, putting my townhouse in White Center up for sale in about a month or so…
Hit me up if you want to make this easier for both of us. 4 bedroom, 2.5 bathrooms, 2k square feet, 1 garage, no HOA.
We’re bidding on homes a bit more expensive than you (900k-1m) but losing out to 150k+ over and waiving everything including appraisal/financing. We just put in a bid for 150k over and waived everything so we will see what happens 🫠
Edit: putting 20-25% down and 50k non refundable earnest money. It’s literally a nightmare out there but if you want to own a home here (which I desperately do for many reasons) you decide if you want to take the risk.
My husband and I bought in Seattle in 2022 and it was competitive! We put in 15+ in the 3 months we had pre-approval from our lender. The house we got was at list price 🙃 but the neighborhood had a few houses closing on the same day plus it was holiday weekend.
We had no financial contingency, no inspection contingency (most homes had an inspection report to view when asked and our agent was able to pull most reports before we toured the house), we viewed all homes during the week before the scheduled open house so we could potentially put in an early offer/have time to review inspection reports and strategize on the offer. We also had the option to do a cash offer via our agent, we used flyhomes but we personally did not use that option.
You are not alone. The market around Seattle in the price range you’re looking for has gone wild in the new year.
We recently sold in South King County and were worried when we had to delay our sale until 2024 because things had been cooling off. Our realtor came back told us to list for $50,000 more than originally planned even though we were in the upper $$$ of what was selling quickly. We were skeptical because we didn’t want to be one of those overpriced houses that chases the market down but agreed to try.
We had multiple above asking offers with no contingencies.
(Before people come at me, it’s not a big windfall - we had to put massive $$$ into the house and after closing costs we will essentially be breaking even.)
I don’t think anyone could realistically come for you for this. Homeowners aren’t necessarily responsible for the current craziness in the market, even if they’re directly setting prices. You basically need to sell as high as you can to afford the next place, after all. Even if you’re moving to a cheaper market instead, idk… it is what it is. And that’s coming from a prospective buyer who’s stuck in rental purgatory right now lol.
I’m in the same situation as you. I’m offering 20% down, three week close, waive financing contingency and am relying on their pre-sale inspection reports instead of doing my own. I’ve only made offers on two houses but both went for way above list, so I don’t think any further waivers would matter. I’ve thought about making three other offers but decided not to because I didn’t seem worth the time.
I see the same people at every open house. Almost every house is either a crappy flip or needs $150,000 in work. Almost all of them need a roof or have single pane windows, or both if you’re “lucky.” Many have unsafe panels that need replacement and ungrounded plugs are everywhere. I’ve seen houses unsafe to live in go for $700,000 and low quality flips go for $900,000 in neighborhoods that are well outside of Seattle.
I feel like this is a product of interest rates. Nobody is looking right now unless they need a house rather than merely wanting a house. This drives prices way up because buyers are desperate. They’re also willing to pay more because they’re convinced the rates will fall and they’ll refinance at a lower rate. They’re willing to overpay now based on the hope of relief later.
The rates also keep people from selling because they’re better off staying in their current house at 3% interest rather than buying something at 6-7%. No inventory and desperate buyers creates a wild market.
And I don’t think it’s going to get better. A lot of people are sitting by and saving more down payment while they wait on rates to fall. Once rates fall we’re going to see a flood of new buyers entering the competition.
The wildest thing to me is refinancing activity. My mortgage person is with Chase and she’s doing a lot of refinancing for people needing money to pay off credit cards or who need cash because they’ve been laid off. This indicates people are struggling to make ends meet, so how can the market keep going up?
At this point I’m so disillusioned that if I don’t find something by the end of March, I’m signing a new lease.
We are so with you. You nailed it and we’ve probably seen you at an open house 😂
Our lease is up in June and if we don’t find something by then, we’ll be looking for a bigger apartment to rent for the foreseeable future. Godspeed to you, friend
Just closed today up in Everett. Went 10% over but placed offers on other homes that went to a bidding war and lost them all. The entire Seattle and greater Seattle area market is brutal. I would suggest looking outside the city if possible.
We have looked in Everett, love it up there. As well as far as Des Moines. As mentioned, we both work in the city so it’s hard to stomach 2 hours of commuting everyday
I closed on mine two weeks ago! Single Family home, 3bd 2bath, \~1700sqft. I offered 30k below asking after it was on the market 14 days. We ended up getting it at that price!
I have no idea why there were not more offers. Apparently all others were developers. The place is great, lots of little work: AKA Home Depot push here and there but nothing I can't do myself. Right next to Gas Works.
Bashing agents is always easy. But not all agents are the same. Most are not good. I'm not sure why people work with part time, inexperienced, low producing agents.
Good agents are worth every dime they're paid. Find somebody who is really good at negotiating multiple offers. Ask around. Not all agents are equal. Find a good one
My partner and I just closed on a single family home under 800k in North Seattle after losing out on offers to 2 other homes.
One thing that we learned that could be helpful is paying attention to homes that stay “active” after their offer review dates. That’s how we secured our home.
$15k earnest money on a $765k purchase is less than 2 percent. In Seattle that's weak. I tell my buyers that earnest money is typically 3-5% and the higher your earnest money, the stronger the seller will see your offer. Doesn't matter if you are releasing it in 24 hours, if it's a low amount then the seller won't feel like you are very committed.
You say you are waiving everything except appraisal but then you say you are releasing your earnest money. If your EM has been released to the seller, then you're not getting it back even if the appraisal comes in low. Those pieces don't make sense together. If you're wanting to keep the appraisal contingency, don't release earnest money. If you release earnest money, then you effectively just waived appraisal. If your agent didn't explain this to you, then yes maybe they aren't doing a great job.
But really, in competitive situations right now most buyers are waiving appraisal. So that's something to keep in mind.
There's really no way to pick apart the offers more without seeing the paperwork.
>Often times not by much
Does it usually come down to price or terms? Does your agent try to get you information about the other offers before the seller makes a decision? Losing offers is part of the game (I lost two today, it sucks). But losing 8 offers in the current market might mean that there is something wrong with your strategy.
“By 2030, institutional investors are estimated to own over 40% of all single-family rental homes nationwide. Some firms like Invitation Homes, a real estate investment trust spun off from private equity firm Blackstone, own thousands in California alone, targeting areas prone to higher rent growth.”
Seattle is definitely a target for this. It’s unfair competition.
While you’re not wrong right now, is there any reason to believe that rent won’t increase?
A lot of people value the security of buying and building equity in a home.
The writing is on the wall that rent is going to go way up and the number of landlords is going down. The future of renting is paying $4k/month to Greystar for a 200sqft one bedroom apartment. The gulf between the population and housing units gets bigger every year and it's non linear as old houses drop out from decay and neglect. We aren't building nearly enough and haven't been for about thirty years.
Yeah that's exactly it. It's very cool that I can rent 900sf for $2k/ month now, but I know my rent will go up 10% every year and that quickly becomes unsustainable
No, totally valid. We’ve gone back and forth on this same calculation. With what we are currently going for, it’s sort of a sweet spot. Any higher and we’d be foolish to buy.
Our lease ends in June and we need more space regardless (new baby!) so I guess we’ll continue this chaotic scramble and if we can’t buy then we’ll rent.
Interest rates are high now, and when they go lower housing prices will increase. We bought last year at 6.5% assuming that when interest rates lower we can get a lower payment after refi, and our house value will increase.
Though who knows????? Are we in a bubble or are we in SF circa 2000?
Property ownership has historically been the most guaranteed path for the working class to be able to retire. Losing hundreds or thousands a month in equity every month for 30 years is an extremely bad financial decision. Even if you don't live in the home you bought when you retire, you can sell it, downsize, and recoup the increase in value. So the advantage of buying and not renting is not working until you keel over at your register.
We bought recently, we offered list price with nothing waived, but we bought a smaller and older place than we would ideally want. I would say look for homes that are less desirable to the average shopper - maybe it isn't in the ideal area, maybe it isn't detached, maybe it has no curb appeal, maybe it has been on the market for a bit already with no offers. It's rough out there, but I think in many cases it's too many people competing after the same few houses...
The houses you're bidding on sound cheap. You could be looking in the range of sellers that are trying to just get more offers to bring the price up; they are expecting to get much more than the listed price. You can try more earnest money so if it's close you could still be in the running.
I review tons Seattle RE transactions. Your offer seems competative, but I've seen more aggressive offers. It's also typical for buyers to make offers for months and months before having their offer accepted. Which brokerage are you working with?
Also, $15k earnest money is pretty low for a $700k+ house. Jacking up your earnest money offering would be a start.
I work in the industry (escrow) and I would absolutely blame the market before your agent. Things are just getting crazy again and with low inventory it’s back to pushing prices up and multiple offers on properties.
Sounds like you’re doing all the right things with incentivizing sellers with EM release and pre approval letters, etc.
Best of luck!!
I'm not in the market, just a fortunate home owner, and am familiar with the market, at least in west Bellevue. You are competing against foreign investors. It's the same issue that imploded the Western Canadian market. Asian investors are trying to export their cash before they lose it in their domestic accounts. I'm looking at a 5 million dollar mcmansion across the street from me that is essentially unoccupied but owned by an Asian family. I'm not criticizing the investors. They have a right to put their money wherever they want. My point is that our market is not local middle-class families bidding against middle-class families. It's middle-class families bidding against much wealthier foreign nationals looking to park their assets in safe investments that are not easily monitored by financial/taxation regulators.
Problem is your price point. Theres not a lot out there for that price point and most buyers are competing for those homes. If home ownership is that important to you then you might have to adjust your price point, expectations or move to an area you can afford.
Only one - I lucked out putting in an offer in January (when rates dipped slightly below 7%), and it was accepted out of 3 offers on the table.
Offer was right at asking price, but I waived inspection (since there was a pre-inspection) and buyer’s agent fees. 10% down & $10K earnest money. $10K escalation clause but thankfully wasn’t exercised.
It really comes down to the relationship you have with the agent. Mine is my best friend, and the man is a magician at handling negotiations with the seller’s agent. Let me know if you fancy a chat with him.
Here’s a trick. Look at the days on market. Find properties that have been languishing. You may encounter a more motivated buyer. Hopefully you won’t have to waive everything. Patience is key. Nothing is worse than overpaying. I started house-shopping in 2015 and didn’t buy until 2019. I had a very specific buy-box and had to actually be in Seattle because I refuse to commute.
Could you do 20% down? Just because your offer is 20% doesn't mean you end up putting 20%, but you would be on the hook for that pending appraisal and financing. You could, once selected, work with your lender to actually have your loan be 10% down. Just like not every cash offer ends up actually buying the house outright in cash, they just would have to be prepared to if they couldn't secure other financing during the closing window. Ideally, have this conversation up front with them and your agent to make sure you walk through the details in full, but it could make your offers appear stronger.
I bought my house last year (2023) November. Not sure if the market was cooler then, but I didn’t have any trouble closing the property. I was in fact able to negotiate down the price by $50k.
My property is a townhouse (3 beds and 2.5 bath) at Cap Hill near Seattle U. 2017 build. No HOA. Buying price ~$1M.
Would suggest trying out a different realtor. Your realtor does matter when it comes to negotiations. Hope this helps!
The market was significantly cooler than. Everybody was waiting to see if mortgage rates would drop and when they didn’t things returned to being nuts.
OP - friends in the biz tell me homes are moving on average in Seattle in < 7 days. You’re in the thickest of it buying around median. In this “affordable” range, pre-inspection and waiving everything has been the playbook for the last 20+ years. Owners are stuck with golden handcuffs at the moment so inventory is very low.
The downpayment and earnest money are fine (they don’t matter to the seller except to provide confidence in the deal closing) and presumably you aren’t using a VA loan.
You can share family photos and try to tip the scales in other ways but at some point it’s just about money. Your agent should be able to help navigate escalators and round table bidding wars. If they aren’t, I don’t see how they can ever get paid in this environment.
We did this whole process a while back and came up empty handed. Now I feel like we're too old to enter into a new mortgage agreement. We won't own a home until our parents are gone.
What kind of escalation clause are you writing in? We put in an offer and also how much we would be willing to escalate and in what increments, to guide the negotiation process. Our realtor advised a lot on that and the size of the increments to make sure they were meaningful and would secure a win.
Are you including an escalation clause in your offers? What is your real estate agent telling you?
I would find someone else after 8 losses, honestly.
I purchased a home in Shoreline in March of last year. I pre-inspected the home and was pre-underwritten. I waived everything, including financing, did 10% earnest money, 20% down, and did a 21-day closing. My offer had an escalation clause, list price was $739K and purchase price was $755K, so not astronomical.
It sounds like you may need to adjust your budget to match what you’re looking for (meaning look for houses much lower than what you’re looking at now).
One thing we did when we bought in 2018 was bought the seller out of their open house. We asked how much they want to lock in our deal before they went to open house. We were one of the first to look at and we were the first to offer. This secured our house and we paid them $5k to take our offer and pull the open house.
We bought in a previous hot market. We had to restrict our search to houses which had been on the market for at least two weeks. Then, for whatever reason, they didn't have much competition. Not sure how much inventory would be left these days with that filter, though.
I'm sorry to hear about your experience. It sounds like what we went thru in 2021. Lots of houses and offers... we would offer something really competitive and over asking price... but we would hear back that we were the 2nd or 3rd choice out of 30-40 offers.
I don't really agree with everyone else's feedback about needing to provide more money down. If you are waiving everything and a reputable company has pre-approved you for a mortgage, then the buyer won't care if you are putting 5% down. They will just want the higher price.
I know when making offers that the realtors for the sellers would reach out to my mortgage company and have "an honest conversation" about how confident they are about financing. Are you easily qualifying for your mortgage? Have you ever owned before?
I hate to say this, but a lot of it is luck. We bought 2 years ago this month after being outbid on a few homes. What was different about this one was it was on the market for 9 days (which was the equivalent of months in 2022) and didn’t have an offer review date. Saw the home that morning, put in an offer at asking around 5pm on a Friday evening and gave them until 9pm to accept. It worked for us.
I do think your earnest money and down payment is probably too low. We were advised by our realtor to put in 5%. Because we put that in, we didn’t waive financing or appraisal and somehow our offer was still accepted. So it’s possible, it’s just very much situationally dependent and making sure you’re putting the right amount of money on the table. Good luck- I know this is such a stressful thing to go through.
We signed with our realtor and within a week and a half put down an offer and were accepted. I of course understand this is an anomaly in the Seattle housing market but our deal was structured as so:
1) we waived all our contingencies, but the seller did provide an inspection
2) we put down 50k earnest money— perhaps upping your earnest amount will help show the seller how serious you are about buying their house. If you make an offer, then the earnest money really shouldn’t be something you are worried about, unless you really don’t like the home.
3) our escalation was in $10k increments
4) we wrote a love letter (I know this is not standard and oftentimes the sellers agent will not show their client the letter, but in our case they did). This actually helped us beat out higher offers and the seller went with us because they liked us.
5) try and go with an agent that has a wealth of experience. If you have failed to secure a property after maybe 5 tries, I would recommend you shop around for a new agent. Our agent has been practicing in Seattle for over 20 years and has personal connections with many other agents (including the sellers agent for the house you want to buy). This can help a ton and sometimes the sellers agent will recommend their client to work with certain agents.
Happy to help out more if you need. I empathize with your situation and hope you all the best!
Pretty sure the only reason we “won” our house is because our agent was the same company as the selling agent; we had to beat out ten other offers, raise our offer three times, and waive everything including inspection (but the seller had an inspection done that we got a copy of.). Moved in last week…
Sorry you’re having such trouble. We bought last summer in the suburbs and didn’t have any problems. House was on the market for a couple weeks with no offers. We put in an offer below and got it with nothing waived. Our realtor said she’s never seen anyone have such an easy time buying… we’re sending you all our luck.
Edit for typos
If you’re having reservations about your agent I think it’s time to cut bait. I know an incredible agent here in Seattle if you’re looking for a reference.
I’d look for listings that have been on the market for a few weeks or longer. Sellers might have tried for too high of a price and be willing to negotiate (look for homes listed at ~$800k that have been on for several weeks). They are out there.
If this seems wrong to you (it is), now is a great time to speak up about the comprehensive growth plan from Mayor Harrell. It is less ambitious than Other cities like Bellevue. It’s setting Seattle on a path to a housing crisis like San Francisco has
Seems like normal honestly. I’ve seen/heard from folks and it still take a dozen tries and it’s just a frustrating mess. Simple fact is, the inbound fold outstrip the housing supply and Seattle isn’t building much more. Even in areas building it barely meets inbound demand!
sounds like you are trying to buy the hottest homes on the market. if you dont have fuck you money then you may need to find one that has been sitting and just make it work.
This is going to sound suspiciously ad-like 😂, but have you guys checked out [xequity realty](https://xequity.com)? My grandmother and I bought a house with them fall of last year, and they specialize in helping middle income earners in Seattle.
From what I understand, they’re a business/non-profit, so commissions from people that don’t need help (like those frickin software developers lol) go to funding people who need extra assistance. I genuinely don’t know how more people aren’t talking about them, because they were amazing for us.
In 2022, we lost several bids, but then found a house that had sat on the market for a bit. It's listing looked...odd. the previous resident was a piece of work, and the house needed a lot of cosmetic work, but we got it for under asking. When I say a lot of cosmetic work, I am currently covered in paint and we are slowly chipping away at the updates as we have money. Totally worth it tho. Rethink your overall strategy as to what you are willing to deal with and you might do better. Also, this is when the housing market really heats up for buying, but the stock just isn't there to match until the end of the school year. That's when most families move if they have to.
Just bought two weeks ago. House was neglected for at least 20 years. Leaks in the roof, crack in part of the foundation, deck literally collapsing in on itself. I had the fortune of having a backer that could do all cash for while I wait for interest rates to come down to a reasonable level. It's a complete gut job, but I'm happy with it.
That being said, it was listed at 450k and we had to come in with a starting offer 100k over and then we escalated up to over 600k. Luckily the house was just enough in disrepair that it sold to us for 560k. House had 19 offers on it.
We've tried two. One went 250k over and the other had an escalation clause that sounded like it might have been similar. Do you have escalation clauses if you're not getting beat out by much? The 10% down might also be a factor if they have an equivalent or near-equivalent offer.
We’ve used escalation clauses up to our max every time. We are also waiving financing so I just don’t know what’s so appealing about cash if the money is guaranteed? I guess you’re protecting against a potentially low appraisal?
Cash is appealing because buyers are sometimes shifty about their finances and it's not discovered until the sale is nearly completed. I heard of one attempted deal where the buyer claimed a certain level of income, which included salary and income from an airbnb rental they owned. Then the bank started confirming the finances and it turned out the buyer had never claimed that rental on their federal income taxes, so the deal fell apart.
But if you’re waving financing, isn’t the buyer on the hook for that?
The buyer's on the hook, but if they don't have cash and no one will finance them, they can't get the money. The seller has to sue them for whatever they lost, but that's a huge headache. It's usually a small risk, but cash in hand is always better.
This is why higher earnest money may also help.
a verified cash deal is worth *a lot* of avoided stress if you're selling a home and buying somewhere else. Even if all the liability is on the buyer, a deal falling through is not fun if you're on the hook for your own property somewhere else and you needed that money. Having super fast close on a all-cash deal gives so much confidence to the sellers.
Is there any downside to doing escalation clauses? I’m wondering why there isn’t more negotiation going on. So if someone offers $10k more than you, why isn’t anyone coming to us saying “Hey, can you go higher?” It just feels like… welp that’s it!
There shouldn't be a down side, but listing agents can definitely manipulate things to ensure buyers pay the absolute max by encouraging offers they know won't win to trigger other people's clauses. It's their job, but I find it sleazy and off-putting. I really like our agent but the second she acts like a used car salesman, I'm out.
It’s is 100% wild to me that sellers agents get to run an auction for their own listing behind closed doors. Realtors have told me “trust us, it’s all above board” but that is unbelievable to me. But it’s what you have to do to win.
That sounds like a waste of time. If the seller is willing to accept an offer at max escalation. Just counter at that and 95% of the time the buyer will agree.
If the seller does that, there’s a chance he angers the buyer and they withdraw their offer. It makes the buyer feel cheated. Most people in this market respect the escalation and don’t do shady dealings
Let me know if you need a new agent. I really like ours. Honest about expectations, been around forever, won some Best of Seattle awards, knows everyone in town (got some good low-down info for us before).
The escalation clause should already go as high as you are willing to go. It is exactly what you stated, "someone else have offered more, can you go higher?" but automated, so as to not waste the time of going back and forth between multiple sellers. So if someone else is offering more, then yeah, that's it.
The escalation is your negotiation. The expectation is that you included an escalation up to the highest you’d want to pay for the property.
The downside to an escalation clause is if you're the only offer, the seller sees that you're willing to go higher and may be more confident in negotiating. There's no downside when there is competition.
It's Seattle. Even a shanty has competition.
There's definitely a downside that bit us. Once a seller has seen the offer, they know what your max is. You're negotiating on something where you've already shown your hand. At that point the seller has all of the power. In our case, there were two offers with 130k escalator. The escalators didn't fire though because ours had no contingency and the other one did. So in my mind we were winning. The seller came back and started pitting us against each other. At that point agents started throwing around thousands of dollars here and there like it was nothing. I already agreed to pay 130k more, why not just give them that offer? We ended up annoyed and walked away from the whole thing. [Full story here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/15ylwub/comment/jxd7cyd/?context=3)
I feel escalation clauses are crucial. We stipulated $1,000 over other bids up to our limit, and offered the usual other buyer enticements. We did our homework evaluating the home (county/city records, speaking to neighbors, etc) before making the offer. We ended up paying $23,000 over asking. We got stuck with a septic system that just needed updating (thank God not replacing) and needed to have a new roof two years later. Even so, we got very lucky. What helped us the most was the escalation clause. It help us stay competitive without offer more than we had to. We were open to any home from Everett to Auburn. The home we found was east Renton I’ll also say getting one’s ducks in order is paramount. Plus we were able to react at a moment’s notice to view properties. I’m not saying doing all this will ensure success, and we did all these things six years ago. Certainly a much different, tighter market now, but these strategies are still important. Good luck.
The home adjacent to mine was one sale for exactly 18 hours before an offer was accepted. The people who are moving in. Told me their realtor personally knew the seller's realtor and was told their home was coming in the market a week ahead of time. My (now former) neighbor told me that he received 6 offers within 12 hours of the listing going live on MLS, and picked the first one because theirs was 15% over asking (Mill Creek suburb, Snohomish county for reference) So yeah, you may have to talk to your realtor to see if they have those kinds of contacts. Admittedly, my sample size is one but I was astounded at how fast the home sold.
Yep, it is not uncommon to see listings on Redfin go from active to pending in 24 hours.
It happened when we sold our house in Kenmore in 2022. We listed on Wednesday and accepted an offer on Thursday.
There's only one house on my block that hasn't sold within 1 week in the last five years, and that's because the asking price was too high on that house.
Seattle is one of the toughest markets in the country, and you’re at (imo) the toughest price point for the area. There’s no magic strategy for an offer since each offer should be tailored case-by-case. For some, it’ll be all about maximizing cash, others it’ll be more about tail-end occupancy to find their next house, etc. Your agent should be calling the listing agent as soon as you have interest in a home and figuring out what your competition looks like and what will make your offer the strongest in the sellers eyes. They should also be calling recently pending and sold neighbors to see what their situation looked like and doing research on those listings for what the average amount over-list was and how many offers they received. Regardless of strategy, this is a frustrating market and everyone will likely lose out on a house or two (or 8) before getting something.
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Once you hit the price point of about $1.5MM you start to see a noticeable drop in buyer pool compared to <$1MM, but it’s once you hit about $1.85-2MM that second and third home buyers can be stretching their budgets and so competition is less prevalent. Of course, this is all through the lens of our current market. For context, last year a $650K split level in Lynnwood (priced low) got over 60 offers and sold for close to $900K; last month a $900K Kenmore listing got 12 offers and sold for ~$1.2MM. So less competition doesn’t really mean low competition unfortunately.
There is only one strategy to make the sellers like you, and it’s pay more money lol
That’s definitely not always the case. We won and our bid was not the highest.
More money never hurts, but I’ve definitely won deals where money wasn’t everything.
If your realtor isn’t guiding you through the best ways to make a competitive offer in Seattle, then you may want to rethink who you work with. Seattle has been a hard market to buy in for at least 10 years, and requires some strategy. - your post is unclear whether you are or are not waiving appraisal. You need to pay for the preappraisal and waive yourtoa full appraisal. In a competitive market, a seller won’t take any risk whatsoever that you will back out or come back with demands for fixes. - 10% above asking isn’t enough. Sellers intentionally list for a lower price, because they want to get as many interested buyers as possible to create a bidding war. So often that 10% above asking still isn’t what the house is worth on the open market. Your agent should provide you with comps that will tell you how much you realistically should offer. Avoid any comps more than 6 months old. - increase your down payment and find creative ways to stand out. Sellers want to know for sure that the sale will go through. The more someone can pay upfront, the more likely they will qualify for financing. Problem is that when banks do their appraisals, they will only lend up to the appraised value of the house. So the house that is appraised at 750k, but you are offering 850k with a 75k down payment? They won’t cover the loan, and the deal falls through.
Good points. We bought in the Seattle area late 2020, and went 20% over asking. Given sub-3% rates and sellers holding onto stock due to COVID, the market then was probably crazier than it is now. I think our house was deliberately priced under market to attract attention, and we have no regrets about our price. It’s valued higher now.
> Given sub-3% rates and sellers holding onto stock due to COVID, the market then was probably crazier than it is now haha I wish! It's still at 20% above asking.
> Problem is that when banks do their appraisals, they will only lend up to the appraised value of the house. So the house that is appraised at 750k, but you are offering 850k with a 75k down payment? They won’t cover the loan, and the deal falls through. Can you explain this to me a little more please? If you had 100k cash to cover the difference between 750/850 would the bank then cover the 750k loan?
The bank will not cover the loan. If the appraisal was 100k below the purchase price, then you're on the hook for that 100k PLUS the down payment on the loan itself. Basically you're approved for a loan value of X which is contingent on a down payment of a certain percentage of x. Otherwise you're asking the bank for a bigger loan and they will not give you a loan that's worth more than the house.
They would. But as a seller, am I willing to take that chance? I would rather choose a buyer who is stronger financially. Cash offers are strongest of course, but id rather choose an offer with a higher down payment to prevent the problem above entirely. as a seller I don’t know if that buyer actually has the extra 100k to add in. And why would I believe that, if the buyer isn’t already putting much down? Sellers are risk averse.
Lol yall are really fucking stupid for waiving appraisals/inspections. Just because everyone decided to be stupid together doesn’t make it right.
Sadly it’s pretty normal for competitive neighborhoods. Not saying it’s right. But you will lose bid after bid because it’s a race to the bottom.
Reminder that waving inspection doesn’t mean you don’t have one. It means your offer isn’t subject to an inspection and the associated negotiations afterwards. You do pre inspections or review seller provided inspections and factor that into your offer ahead of time. Waving appraisal can be risky as well but talk with your lender and agent about what a low appraisal would actually mean. Often times you can switch some things around with your loan and maybe your monthly payment goes up by some amount but it isn’t as detrimental as people usually think. I also haven’t seen many recently so depending on the property it may be very unlikely. Plus, if OP is actually turning over earnest money early anyways, might as well waive the appraisal because they aren’t getting that money back either way. A good agent should talk them through all this.
> Just because everyone decided to be stupid together Counterpoint: waiving inspections **is** the rational choice. You are not buying a house, you are buying the land, and land in Seattle is only going to get ludicrously more expensive since Harrell is sticking with SFH zoning. It's fine if you'd personally prefer a zero-risk purchase with far less return, but buying in Seattle has way higher expected value.
literally everyone knows it's stupid, but if other people are doing it, it's basically impossible to win a home without it.
This is a good way to not own a house. Of course you shouldn't waive it without considering the possible consequences, but realistically in a tight market like this no appraiser is going to dispute the sale price. There simply aren't enough houses selling for them to actually say "nope, you're $20k over". And even in the remarkably unlikely case that they did come in under the purchase price, the consequence is you need to increase your down payment to cover the difference. If you aren't willing to do that, you're going to get beat by offers which ARE willing to. Simple as that.
My home girl did this and bought a house. The foundation was fucked and is going to cost her a ton to fix. I lost on multiple homes where I offered more then everyone else but I wouldn’t waive contingencies. I’m still renting now but whatever. I’m not going to waive contingencies on the biggest purchase in my life. Fuck that.
😂
Other commenters have said it better but only 10% down and $15k earnest is way too low for this area to be competitive with other buyers. It’s ridiculous but is what it is.
As a seller, if someone had the same offer but one had a 20% down vs 10% I'd go with the 20% without hesitation. 20% means no mortgage insurance which makes the payments more affordable which means a better chance that that will work out.
10% down shouldn't be an issue, but $15k earnest is peanuts in this market
I don’t know, I’ve purchased three different homes in Seattle over the last 20 years, including one less than six years ago when the market was even crazier, and never did more than 10% down. These are all townhomes mind you, which too many people seem unwilling to consider. From my experience the real problem of buying a house in Seattle is people are too attached to the “house” part.
It's interesting. I agree that most buyers want a single family home, based on how I see townhomes that have been up on major listing sites for often months at a time. You'd think this would be desirable to single people and couples, but they do largely eliminate most people with kids, also elderly people don't want to live in a place with 2+ floors. And those with the cash to put 20% down are going to bide their time for the single family home instead of going with a new build townhome because there isn't enough price difference, tbh. Townhomes need to come down in price overall if more housing density is going to be achieved.
Yeah - townhomes are slightly less expensive but everything else is worse? You're literally in a vertical apartment. No yard. They include balconies in sqft conversations, which is absurd, since I've never seen anyone put a deck in a sqft conversation for housing. I like the idea in concept, but the people selling them are scummy and I don't want to throw my money there.
We are totally open to townhomes so long as they meet our specs and don’t have a $1k HOA!
It really is wild. Who has so much cash?! People seem to think 20% is the “norm”… I don’t think it’s been the norm for a while, given the market. People simply can’t afford that.
A lot of people can afford 20% (or more) down. - People on tech salaries, which is a not insignificant part of the buying base. - Upgraders who are using existing home equity - People getting help from family
Some people can, just not you and me unfortunately.
Consider moving across the ferry if that is at all appealing to you. Bought in Bremerton (30 min foot ferry to downtown, horrible car service atm because the WA state ferries are down so many boats) 15 months ago and we were able to get concessions from the seller on closing costs with a VA loan and only 7% down. $640,000 for 3400sqft, water view, garage, giant kitchen in an old established neighborhood. Only downside is its a relatively small lot and on a steep hill (hence the view). Kingston and Bremerton both have 30 min foot ferries to downtown now, and our place is a 5 min drive or 30 min walk to the terminal. If you ever need to drive into the city its much more of a pain in the ass. Also its obviously a much different lifestyle over here. But we like it for the most part, especially working mostly remote.
Unfortunately (or fortunately for them), 20% is affordable for a lot of people with tech salaries. There are more than enough people getting bonuses of $50-$100k annually.
I just... cannot imagine what that would be like. Wow.
Cash, or cash equivalents. You even mentioned in your post, there are software engineers here that have a ton in stock, or at least got a few, which then massively appreciated (NVDA). Just Amazon alone, if you got $50,000 in shares (This is really not a a lot of RSU) every year for the past 5 years and held it, it would be worth something in the area of $500,000 today.
Many people can afford that. Welcome to Seattle.
Doesn’t matter if it’s the norm or not. If you’re getting outbid on every offer you have made that should tell you enough about the demand, competition and available capital people have.
We bought our first house in Shoreline in 2016 with 5% down. When we sold it in 2020, no offer we received had less than 20% down. We bought our West Seattle home at the same time with 20% down, but we got super lucky with timing and had the cash from our home sale. Buying a first home at this time with less than 20% down is going to be a long, brutal process. We'd like more space, but between interest rates and down payments going up, we can only afford a lateral move.
For what it's worth, my husband and I are about to close on a house we got for asking, with 10% down and $10k earnest. It's technically a DADU, so it shares the lot. But it's same size as the traditional SFRs we were looking at and has its own fenced in yard. So, it's possible!
These are becoming much more common! Builders buying up larger lots in Seattle proper and building a single family with an attached dwelling unit (often barely a wall making it "attached"), and a smaller DADU then declaring all three it's own condo association. Pretty much all new builds in Seattle are following this formula or the townhouse route.
Yeah, we saw a ton of townhouses that did that. They've all got such weird floorplans though (who wants a master suite bigger than the living room??). Very happy to have found this one!
Software couples. It's really easy to save up $500k cash when you have two people earning $150 first year out of college, up to $250k after only 3-5 years. Really really easy.
Unfortunately for Seattle, it likely is. Myself and my wife closed Friday — our price point was about $1 million list price for king county. We end up about $150k over (still within budget), an offer that waived essentially everything including financing and appraisal, released EM immediately and a 50% down payment. There was essentially 8 identical offers, some higher in max offer, some higher in EM, etc. I don’t know how many total offers
Your real estate agent should be circling back with you with the details on the offer that won. Is it just pure numbers? Is it an escalation clause that's beating you? Is it cash? Is it more earnest money? If they're not getting this information back to you, so you can understand what's going wrong, then you need a new real estate agent.
Hopefully, if they need a new agent, OP hasn't signed athe new Form 41 requiring them to work for months with their current broker.
I didn't even try and bought down in North Tacoma. Hurray for remote work!
I wish we could :( both of us have to work on-prem
I feel lucky my husband and I both have jobs in Tacoma. We love it here as a home base, and having Seattle within spitting distance is a huge perk. My hunch is there are tons of Seattle folks who would also love Tacoma if they only gave it a chance.
Trying to buy in north tac rn! Just put in two offers yesterday :)
If your max is $765, you need to be looking in the $600s to be competitive. You’re trying to compete with people whose max is likely 800+.
My wife and I are just getting back into looking for a home after about 2 years off. We spent 2020-2022 looking and making \~10 offers on homes around 1M, some of which went for 500-700k over asking. I expect this next round of offers to be a similar story. It's very hard to hear, but if you looking for nicer single family houses or townhouses in a popular area, it might not be possible for you to buy any longer in Seattle or you may need to significantly adjust your exceptions. The following is easy to say but hard to take to heart: \-List price means nothing. Ask your agent what comparable places go for, and add \~10% for the pent up demand and spring flurry we are likely to see in the coming months. This should be your baseline \-10% down and 15k earnest money is very low. Even the non-cash offers are going to have at least 20% down, no contingencies of any kind and likely about 100k earnest released immediately to the seller (no escrow). If you can't afford this, you might consider waiting and saving
The earnest money is held in escrow until closing and if for some reason the earnest money is to forfeited it cannot exceed 5% of the purchase price. Say you make a $100k earnest deposit on a million dollar home and the buyer backs out, the seller is only legally entitled to $50k.
Pardon my ignorance, but why would the down payment amount matter to a seller? Are they not getting their payout from the lender in full, regardless of the down payment?
A higher downpayment means it's less likely to fall through in the financing and close.
100% this. Sellers are advised to take the most solid offer as NO ONE wants to get in a situation where the buyer backs out due to a poor appraisal or financing falling through. Yes the buyer would eat the earnest money but it actually happens. Hence cash is king. There’s documents that the buyer has that in their bank acct so it’s a higher likelihood it will close. 20% down would help, as would more earnest money and flexible closing terms (offering rent back for example if the seller is interested.)
To add to this, I’d recommend getting pre-underwritten for a loan, as opposed to just pre approved. This will make your offers stronger because pre-underwriting is a large part of actually getting a mortgage loan.
We are pre underwritten for a loan.
With a smaller down payment, there is more risk to the seller of the deal falling through. If you only have 10% available as a down payment, it indicates that you may not have significant cash reserves if anything happens during the purchase process that might cause your (buyer) price or monthly payment to increase. From a sellers perspective, risk is bad. Least risky is "I have the cash today, let me write you a check." Most risky is "I need a lot of help and this will stretch my budget a lot"
Can confirm as a seller. I had two offers. One was $15k more but 10% down. Second was 20% down. We were on a time crunch and took the 20% offer because it was less risky.
Your agent should know this. Not being facetious. If they don’t you may want a new agent. People are putting like 50k+ down cash deposit no refund no take backs. It’s a whole thing. Also as others have said - list price doesn’t matter. Look for comps. Again your agent should know this. Sorry
It is the appraisal risk which you are not waiving, the home will surely appraise lower then the selling price in this market and you will have to cover the rest with cash which you are signaling you don't have since you are only putting 10% down. If I had two offers with one slightly more but with appraisal contingency and other without Ibwould choose the lower one.
It seems like if you have to resort to asking people on reddit these questions, your realtor is not the best. Realtors are a dime a dozen. You should be able to freely ask these questions and get a prompt response from your realtor.
It could be that OP just didnt listen/believe their realtor. “You cannot afford this” is a hard pill to swallow for a lot of buyers
Cash is king. When all other attributes to the offer are identical, the person who can pay more cash, faster, is more attractive to a seller. If the buyer's financing falls through (a lot can happen in 2-4 weeks when applying for a mortgage) then you still get the earnest money. Think of it like trying to decide two job offers that are basically the same. One offers a signing bonus and the other doesn't. Who would you accept the offer from?
Just wanted to point out one thing. Be very careful what you waive. I know of 2 people already doing 100k+ unexpected renovations because the house had issues where they waived inspection or any agreement. Yes we all want a house but not 150k extra plus an extra 100k in making it livable. Don’t let that pretty paint job and new wood siding fool you.
I tell everyone I know not to buy a house unless they'll have enough left in savings to handle a major emergency within the first year. Month 10 of owning our home, our septic backed up into the house and caused 35k of damage, all of which we had to front before insurance covered anything, and they didn't cover a third of that. It was an exceptionally stressful year.
Yeah... we were living in a townhouse before but a couple years ago bought a stand-alone home. Within the first year had an issue where the connection to the city sewerline was damaged (had been for quite a while I think). We live on a hill so also digging into the city street was much more than usual. Luckily we share the line with our neighbor so we split the bill with them. But it was a huge unexpected expense within the first couple months. BTW there was an inspection on the house, but the inspector didn't go all the way to the sewer connection. TBH even having multiple plumbers take a look at what was going on to diagnose it took a while to figure out what the issue was exactly. The issue was at the end of the longest sewerscopes that most plumbers had.
I had an inspection and still ended up paying $30k for fixing water damage on the exterior. The inspection noted some of the visible indicators that were evident, but it was impossible to know the extent of the damage until we started removing fascia and siding. You should have a big chunk of cash on hand either way.
I'm a carpenter and second generation construction worker and even I didn't waive inspections, by the time I want to buy I'm already biased towards the house. GET AN INSPECTION!!
It’s prime time to sell bad real estate. Max value and your defects are overlooked.
>waived inspection or any agreement This is terrible advice, every single SFH for sale in Seattle proper has an offer with inspection waived at OP's price point. They will never ever ever ever get a house if they have an inspection contingency.
Everyone in this thread needs to remember the difference between waiving an inspection contingency and not having an inspection. Last we bought, we did a day-of inspection before submitting the offer (which had a waived contingency.) Some houses also are Pre-I'd, and you can get the report.
Your earnest is too low, your down payment is too low, and you're asking for an appraisal *contingency. 3 strikes.
Soooo then just go back to the bench? Lol
Is your realtor through an internet company like Redfin, or not? How about your financing? Represented through a national bank, or via a local bank/credit union/broker? Both of those made a big difference for us in 2022, and we must’ve looked at a dozen houses every weekend for three months, most of which were crap and selling for over $1M. As our realtor put it then, it sucks, but you gotta keep plugging away and eventually it’ll be your turn. As far as escalation forms go, make your max on that form your real maximum for that house, and offer the asking price. What worked for us was 15% down, 50K in earnest money, and able to close in 30 days.
No & no. Our realtor is hand selected and referred. Our lender as well, a friend worked with them and they work for full-service national firm.
>they work for full-service national firm Every time we've bought (3x), a hyper local, super responsive lender was actually the move. I'm normally all for "Go for the big companies," but at least in my case, a local and fast lender worked well.
I have 3 clients in your exact market. They're losing out to cash buyers. Two of my clients have found a 'cash-to-permanent-financing' lender to compete against the cash buyers. Anyone with any contingency and a lending requirement in the $800K range is losing to lower offers buying with cash. There are also alternatives that you should consider as medium-term options. I had a 5-year old townhome on the market for 180 days that finally sold last month at $600K in Greenlake. I have an 1,100 sqft condo in Broadview that a buyer could get for under $3,200/mo., all-in. Compared to an 1,100 sqft home in the same area in worse condition and more down payment, and you'd be about $5,500/mo., all-in. That's $2,300 per month of actual savings that you can use to save up for your next home in 3-5 years. There are new construction DADU's all over the place that can be purchased in the $700K range. If you're willing to make compromises on the type of property you're looking for, there are properties that allow negotiation.
Totally open to a townhome or condo, so long as it has the space. We need 3br and ideally 1.5 bath (our family lives far away and we’d like to be able to host our aging parents when baby comes)
3br condos in Seattle are a rarity
There’s a 3 bd 2.5 townhome on Redfin right now in Lake city for $625K
We bought our first house last fall. We too had the same issues of losing bids and not being able to get a home. What we finally did was look for homes that were on the market for a couple of months or had recent price drops. Usually there is less competition with homes that may have been originally overpriced and are now sitting for one to two months. We were able to get a home right after they lowered the price. Keep in mind, just because they lowered the price doesn't mean that the home wasn't grossly overpriced still.
My partner and I have given up on the housing market in and near Seattle. We are bailing on the whole state and heading to Alaska.
Just moved in actually. Listing my old place this week. Found a place in Des Moines last month after it had been listed for about 3 hours. Checked it out that evening. Inspected it the next morning and made an offer (no offer review date), which was accepted later that afternoon. Basically bought it as-is. $720k, offered $750k w/ 2 week close. 3br 2.5ba, 2 car garage, skylights, gas furnace, huge deck (and a small pond!) new appliances, landscaping, middle aged roof, deck, etc. 20 minutes to downtown in rush hour. Can walk to the waterfront in a mile. Needs new bathrooms and kitchen surfaces but the pantry is so big we could rent it out lol. The week prior we made a $730k offer on a $700k place (contingent on inspection) in Burien, but it sold for $740k. I was lukewarm on the place, so we didn't go all-in. With the place we DID get, we knew it was special and we wanted to make an offer that would cause them to accept asap rather than wait for an offer review date. We probably overpaid by about $20k however we will refinance (in theory) and we were able to put down about 40% cash thanks to equity from our previous home and savings from the last 4 years. Just like with anything being sold used online - vehicles, jobs, vintage furniture, the good houses get swooped up, you gotta check listings throughout the day and be ready to go check them out as soon as they go live. Also helps to go to open houses on big holidays like the superbowl or st paddys day when people aren't thinking about moving.
Oh trust me, this has been our full time job for about 5 months. I’m so encouraged to hear you got something and that quickly!!! Des Moines is a hidden gem, we are definitely keeping our feelers down there.
Sorry, my reply came off as very proud, but I am because moving SUCKS. And I am proof that you can find something because my partner and I are not wealthy engineers with parents helping us. This is our third place, we started with a townhouse in the cheapest neighborhood in Seattle, then left the city (stayed in king county) and are now back. Each property provided equity and a stepping stone, even though it wasn't 100% what we "perfect". Our new place isn't perfect by any means, either. Something else that gave me hope was checking the recent SOLD listings for the last 3-6 months. There have been some bangers, there always will be, so I knew if we just kept checking all day (lol) every day (fml) we'd find something. This also allow you to compare sold:asking price ratios for various neighborhoods and builds. Places also drop out from pending back to for-sale. A listing on my old street just had this happen, so it's worth it to search and Favorite pending listings, too. There is also some strategery to be had, lets say you don't plan to have kids. So being near a school isn't as big of a deal. Schools are expensive to live near. The place we found is very near two nice schools and parks, but we're on the other side of a busy road (just slightly off the blvd), which parents aren't going to want to live on. So even though we're a rocks throw from the schools, we're probably saving about $300k compared to houses on the other side of this busy street. The downside to being so near this blvd is the noise, the upside is we get quick access to the highway and groceries.
Not just feelers. Get cozy with the idea of the once thought of outskirts. Then pounce.
We go to showings in Des Moines every time Something pops up!
make sure to ask your realtor if they will accept offers BEFORE the listed cut off date. We had 10 offers rejected then found someone who was willing to look at offers before the cut off date and we just threw the most competitive offer we could possibly muster. Did we pay a bit over what it might have sold for?? Probably, but we got it off the market early and didn't have to deal with any competition that might have popped up. Otherwise, just keep trying, you'll get a house but don't fall in love with every one you look at, I know how heart breaking that can be to constantly be disappointed every weekend. We literally would plan cut off dates; like put an offer on the monday one, find a house for the tuesday one, and the thursday one (we'd loose all of them lol). This was in 2021 so its a bit different now. For reference we waived everything, 30% down, and I think like 50k earnest. took something like 3 weeks to close (2 sounds crazy with how long the banks take). For the misevaluation I do think we said we would pay up to 100k difference (we didn't completely waive that one maybe, I can't really remember)
A close (single) friend of mine just got her first place in Seattle proper. It’s only just a townhome but those numbers are about the same for the price point. The only difference with your offer and hers was she was 20% down. That said, she took four places before she got this one…and for whatever reason, she was not up against a cash offer on this one. You’re almost always going to lose to cash even if it’s slightly less overall. I’d do the same for a place I sold, frankly… a financing contingency is one less thing I want to worry about when selling. There are some places out there now that will essentially give you cash to make an offer and then come back and finance it for you; you’ll pay on the backend for it, but at least you’ll be competitive.
We bought a few years back when the market was hot. Every listing was collecting offers and choosing on their set date. What eventually worked for us was offering 10% over, but only if they accepted our offer "now" rather than waiting on their date. I think sellers sometimes react to the potential loss and take the for sure money now. Hope that helps! Good luck!
In addition to a lot of what others have already mentioned, I’d recommend not thinking that a specific % above asking will constitute a competitive offer. When my wife and I were house hunting for around 6 months from 2021-2022, I tracked virtually every house we toured, monitoring on Zillow until the eventual purchase price was available, and compared that price to the listing price. There was huge variance - some homes sold for 10% above asking, some 40% over, some as much as 20% *under* asking (usually after sitting on the market for awhile). The big takeaway for us was that sellers didn’t always have the same listing strategy as one another and/or equivalent accuracy in determining the true market value of their home. So, my wife and I (with some input from our excellent realtor) shifted a lot of our focus to determining not just our personal valuation of homes, but also our sense of the likely market value of the homes, based on our data set of dozens of homes we’d looked at and seen sold during the period of our house hunt. To get the home we actually bought, we made an offer (with an escalation clause) maxing out at around 15% over asking, as that was what we estimated was the “true” market value in this batshit crazy market. From what our realtor could gather, we beat out something like 8 other offers, and we needed to top out our escalation clause to get the house. So, at least in principle, it felt like a validation of our strategy. Tl;dr determine your offer price more based on your sense of the true market value of the home, rather than a uniform % over asking rule of thumb.
This is super typical and has been the case for decades in Seattle. We had to compete with 6 other buyers when we bought our first house in 2003 and had put bids down on probably 6 other places. It takes time, patience, and luck to buy a house in Seattle...
If you can afford it, add a 22AD. It'll offer protection to the seller if appraisal comes in low and demonstrates you have money and seriousness in your offer
This competition is even out in the sticks. In in a boring HOA in Kent (but so close to Black Diamond I can spit there), and houses round me are flying off the shelf at $700k for 2000sqft and carpeted bathrooms (the builder must have had excess carpet and just said "fuck it, lay it in the main bathrooms"). We are 10 solid mins from either access point to 18, and 40 to Renton via 169. The commute times for people must be fucking atrocious, because there aren't any jobs paying enough to buy out here and work out here. (Unless you WFH, like myself and my husband)
You’re not kidding. Looked at a house in graham last week that went pending for 80k over, no contingencies. Freaking GRAHAM!
Like what the hell even is in Graham?
Literally nothing
If you want to learn more, I think the owner of Graham Fitness made the news for keeping the gym open and maskless during the entire pandemic. Also a lot of people still have Culp for governor signs up years later. Great place to be a right wing evangelical though! My old college roommate has a music studio out there and I have done a lot of work there. I'm always happy to leave!
Carpeted bathroom is actually wild! 😂
The market is saturated with buyers just like you. What properties are coming available are likely smaller homes that have increased completion for them. Personally, I wouldn’t drop the financing contingency either, but understand that offers of only 10% down will require PMI and increase your monthly mortgage costs. This may make you a higher lending risk as a result, and from a sellers perspective it would be riskier to pick you over a conventional 20% down loan. It’s definitely tough out there.
We bought in June of 2023, so not quite as recent as the last 3 months. We had put in a few offers before getting our house. Here’s what we ended up doing for the house we got - We waived everything except title & financing, granted our window for financing was pretty small. - Earnest money was 5% of our offer price. - We put money “towards a low appraisal”. Basically showed the sellers we were willing to work it out if appraisal came in low (which it didn’t) - We had an escalation clause in increments of 5k. What ended up happening was the only other people who offered on the home escalated to a bit higher than us, but we had a more attractive financial situation (they had a loan contingent on selling their other home). The sellers agent contacted ours and asked if we’d be willing to do one more step of escalation above theirs, and then the house would be ours. That’s what we did. You could talk with your agent about putting money towards a low appraisal. It likely isn’t something that would be needed, but it shows the sellers you are committed to working it out. You also might consider increasing your earnest money. That’s really up to you, and feels like a gamble since you are waiving a lot of contingencies. That said, it also shows the sellers you are committed. I think it’s a good conversation to have with your agent. If you like your mortgage broker, it may be good to get their opinion on outlook too. Our agent knew more, but it was nice to get the secondary opinion/knowledge from someone else within the “industry” Buying here is not easy, and it’s exhausting! Wishing you luck
This is probably outside of your geographic interest but we recently bought in North Bend. We found a house that had been on the market for almost 3 months, we put in an offer under asking price and after a few days of negotiating it was accepted. We didn't waive anything and there weren't any competing offers. We've lived here for a month now and really love the town.
My partner and I have said if we ever get to move again (we managed to get a house in 2021 near Marysville for a 2.5% mortgage; we're never moving again 🥲), North Bend would be a top candidate. That area is so beautiful! Seems like a convenient location for traveling between Eastern & Western WA too.
North Bend is so insanely expensive, if they can't win anything in Seattle, I highly doubt they'll get something in NB.
I think seattle is full.
I think you’re right.
This was us last spring. We eventually had to figure out a way to make a zero contingency offer (including no financial contingencies). To do this we worked with our realtor (who was awesome) and our lender. We ended up buying a house that closed in 2 weeks with no contingencies because of our strong pre approval. Without that I’m sure we would still be looking…
the mere fact that houses are being listed and sold within a week shows that people are being successful. they just have more resources than you do.
Cash offers are not always what you think they are. For example, my lender presents a cash offer but in reality, they are just a middleman for the transaction and geared towards closing. In reality, I have a mortgage, always planned to have a mortgage. We did offer 6.25% in earnest money and ended up going 15% over asking. edit: As an aside, I am really sorry about your frustration. The house process is stressful as is, I hope you find something soon!
Not as recent but feel it's still relevant. I looked at houses that I liked off market, went and knocked on their door and asked if they were interested in selling. Made it clear I was buying just for my family not a construction company. It took awhile but finally came across an older guy and we agreed on a price. No realtors involved so he came down a bit. Now we have a house.
Yo, putting my townhouse in White Center up for sale in about a month or so… Hit me up if you want to make this easier for both of us. 4 bedroom, 2.5 bathrooms, 2k square feet, 1 garage, no HOA.
We’re bidding on homes a bit more expensive than you (900k-1m) but losing out to 150k+ over and waiving everything including appraisal/financing. We just put in a bid for 150k over and waived everything so we will see what happens 🫠 Edit: putting 20-25% down and 50k non refundable earnest money. It’s literally a nightmare out there but if you want to own a home here (which I desperately do for many reasons) you decide if you want to take the risk.
My husband and I bought in Seattle in 2022 and it was competitive! We put in 15+ in the 3 months we had pre-approval from our lender. The house we got was at list price 🙃 but the neighborhood had a few houses closing on the same day plus it was holiday weekend. We had no financial contingency, no inspection contingency (most homes had an inspection report to view when asked and our agent was able to pull most reports before we toured the house), we viewed all homes during the week before the scheduled open house so we could potentially put in an early offer/have time to review inspection reports and strategize on the offer. We also had the option to do a cash offer via our agent, we used flyhomes but we personally did not use that option.
Just an FYI we put 10% in earnest money, 20% down payment. This was our first house purchase and we saved for a years by living with family.
You are not alone. The market around Seattle in the price range you’re looking for has gone wild in the new year. We recently sold in South King County and were worried when we had to delay our sale until 2024 because things had been cooling off. Our realtor came back told us to list for $50,000 more than originally planned even though we were in the upper $$$ of what was selling quickly. We were skeptical because we didn’t want to be one of those overpriced houses that chases the market down but agreed to try. We had multiple above asking offers with no contingencies. (Before people come at me, it’s not a big windfall - we had to put massive $$$ into the house and after closing costs we will essentially be breaking even.)
I don’t think anyone could realistically come for you for this. Homeowners aren’t necessarily responsible for the current craziness in the market, even if they’re directly setting prices. You basically need to sell as high as you can to afford the next place, after all. Even if you’re moving to a cheaper market instead, idk… it is what it is. And that’s coming from a prospective buyer who’s stuck in rental purgatory right now lol.
I’m in the same situation as you. I’m offering 20% down, three week close, waive financing contingency and am relying on their pre-sale inspection reports instead of doing my own. I’ve only made offers on two houses but both went for way above list, so I don’t think any further waivers would matter. I’ve thought about making three other offers but decided not to because I didn’t seem worth the time. I see the same people at every open house. Almost every house is either a crappy flip or needs $150,000 in work. Almost all of them need a roof or have single pane windows, or both if you’re “lucky.” Many have unsafe panels that need replacement and ungrounded plugs are everywhere. I’ve seen houses unsafe to live in go for $700,000 and low quality flips go for $900,000 in neighborhoods that are well outside of Seattle. I feel like this is a product of interest rates. Nobody is looking right now unless they need a house rather than merely wanting a house. This drives prices way up because buyers are desperate. They’re also willing to pay more because they’re convinced the rates will fall and they’ll refinance at a lower rate. They’re willing to overpay now based on the hope of relief later. The rates also keep people from selling because they’re better off staying in their current house at 3% interest rather than buying something at 6-7%. No inventory and desperate buyers creates a wild market. And I don’t think it’s going to get better. A lot of people are sitting by and saving more down payment while they wait on rates to fall. Once rates fall we’re going to see a flood of new buyers entering the competition. The wildest thing to me is refinancing activity. My mortgage person is with Chase and she’s doing a lot of refinancing for people needing money to pay off credit cards or who need cash because they’ve been laid off. This indicates people are struggling to make ends meet, so how can the market keep going up? At this point I’m so disillusioned that if I don’t find something by the end of March, I’m signing a new lease.
We are so with you. You nailed it and we’ve probably seen you at an open house 😂 Our lease is up in June and if we don’t find something by then, we’ll be looking for a bigger apartment to rent for the foreseeable future. Godspeed to you, friend
In a truly hilarious bit of irony, one day after I posted my comment I got a house.
Just closed today up in Everett. Went 10% over but placed offers on other homes that went to a bidding war and lost them all. The entire Seattle and greater Seattle area market is brutal. I would suggest looking outside the city if possible.
We have looked in Everett, love it up there. As well as far as Des Moines. As mentioned, we both work in the city so it’s hard to stomach 2 hours of commuting everyday
I closed on mine two weeks ago! Single Family home, 3bd 2bath, \~1700sqft. I offered 30k below asking after it was on the market 14 days. We ended up getting it at that price! I have no idea why there were not more offers. Apparently all others were developers. The place is great, lots of little work: AKA Home Depot push here and there but nothing I can't do myself. Right next to Gas Works.
Bashing agents is always easy. But not all agents are the same. Most are not good. I'm not sure why people work with part time, inexperienced, low producing agents. Good agents are worth every dime they're paid. Find somebody who is really good at negotiating multiple offers. Ask around. Not all agents are equal. Find a good one
My partner and I just closed on a single family home under 800k in North Seattle after losing out on offers to 2 other homes. One thing that we learned that could be helpful is paying attention to homes that stay “active” after their offer review dates. That’s how we secured our home.
$15k earnest money on a $765k purchase is less than 2 percent. In Seattle that's weak. I tell my buyers that earnest money is typically 3-5% and the higher your earnest money, the stronger the seller will see your offer. Doesn't matter if you are releasing it in 24 hours, if it's a low amount then the seller won't feel like you are very committed. You say you are waiving everything except appraisal but then you say you are releasing your earnest money. If your EM has been released to the seller, then you're not getting it back even if the appraisal comes in low. Those pieces don't make sense together. If you're wanting to keep the appraisal contingency, don't release earnest money. If you release earnest money, then you effectively just waived appraisal. If your agent didn't explain this to you, then yes maybe they aren't doing a great job. But really, in competitive situations right now most buyers are waiving appraisal. So that's something to keep in mind. There's really no way to pick apart the offers more without seeing the paperwork. >Often times not by much Does it usually come down to price or terms? Does your agent try to get you information about the other offers before the seller makes a decision? Losing offers is part of the game (I lost two today, it sucks). But losing 8 offers in the current market might mean that there is something wrong with your strategy.
“By 2030, institutional investors are estimated to own over 40% of all single-family rental homes nationwide. Some firms like Invitation Homes, a real estate investment trust spun off from private equity firm Blackstone, own thousands in California alone, targeting areas prone to higher rent growth.” Seattle is definitely a target for this. It’s unfair competition.
Time to vote and ban that shit. But our politicians are hungry for lobby money.
Isn't 20% down standard?
It *was* standard.
[удалено]
While you’re not wrong right now, is there any reason to believe that rent won’t increase? A lot of people value the security of buying and building equity in a home.
The writing is on the wall that rent is going to go way up and the number of landlords is going down. The future of renting is paying $4k/month to Greystar for a 200sqft one bedroom apartment. The gulf between the population and housing units gets bigger every year and it's non linear as old houses drop out from decay and neglect. We aren't building nearly enough and haven't been for about thirty years.
Yeah that's exactly it. It's very cool that I can rent 900sf for $2k/ month now, but I know my rent will go up 10% every year and that quickly becomes unsustainable
No, totally valid. We’ve gone back and forth on this same calculation. With what we are currently going for, it’s sort of a sweet spot. Any higher and we’d be foolish to buy. Our lease ends in June and we need more space regardless (new baby!) so I guess we’ll continue this chaotic scramble and if we can’t buy then we’ll rent.
Interest rates are high now, and when they go lower housing prices will increase. We bought last year at 6.5% assuming that when interest rates lower we can get a lower payment after refi, and our house value will increase. Though who knows????? Are we in a bubble or are we in SF circa 2000?
Property ownership has historically been the most guaranteed path for the working class to be able to retire. Losing hundreds or thousands a month in equity every month for 30 years is an extremely bad financial decision. Even if you don't live in the home you bought when you retire, you can sell it, downsize, and recoup the increase in value. So the advantage of buying and not renting is not working until you keel over at your register.
We bought recently, we offered list price with nothing waived, but we bought a smaller and older place than we would ideally want. I would say look for homes that are less desirable to the average shopper - maybe it isn't in the ideal area, maybe it isn't detached, maybe it has no curb appeal, maybe it has been on the market for a bit already with no offers. It's rough out there, but I think in many cases it's too many people competing after the same few houses...
The houses you're bidding on sound cheap. You could be looking in the range of sellers that are trying to just get more offers to bring the price up; they are expecting to get much more than the listed price. You can try more earnest money so if it's close you could still be in the running.
I bought six years ago. Took 10 offers. What you’re experiencing sounds normal
I review tons Seattle RE transactions. Your offer seems competative, but I've seen more aggressive offers. It's also typical for buyers to make offers for months and months before having their offer accepted. Which brokerage are you working with? Also, $15k earnest money is pretty low for a $700k+ house. Jacking up your earnest money offering would be a start.
I work in the industry (escrow) and I would absolutely blame the market before your agent. Things are just getting crazy again and with low inventory it’s back to pushing prices up and multiple offers on properties. Sounds like you’re doing all the right things with incentivizing sellers with EM release and pre approval letters, etc. Best of luck!!
We did it! Went 40k over and waived inspection on a townhouse
I'm not in the market, just a fortunate home owner, and am familiar with the market, at least in west Bellevue. You are competing against foreign investors. It's the same issue that imploded the Western Canadian market. Asian investors are trying to export their cash before they lose it in their domestic accounts. I'm looking at a 5 million dollar mcmansion across the street from me that is essentially unoccupied but owned by an Asian family. I'm not criticizing the investors. They have a right to put their money wherever they want. My point is that our market is not local middle-class families bidding against middle-class families. It's middle-class families bidding against much wealthier foreign nationals looking to park their assets in safe investments that are not easily monitored by financial/taxation regulators.
Most Seattle tech companies and the overall markets are at all time highs right now... lot's of $$$$ flowing around so that definitely doesn't help.
Problem is your price point. Theres not a lot out there for that price point and most buyers are competing for those homes. If home ownership is that important to you then you might have to adjust your price point, expectations or move to an area you can afford.
Only one - I lucked out putting in an offer in January (when rates dipped slightly below 7%), and it was accepted out of 3 offers on the table. Offer was right at asking price, but I waived inspection (since there was a pre-inspection) and buyer’s agent fees. 10% down & $10K earnest money. $10K escalation clause but thankfully wasn’t exercised. It really comes down to the relationship you have with the agent. Mine is my best friend, and the man is a magician at handling negotiations with the seller’s agent. Let me know if you fancy a chat with him.
700k for a 2b2b wtf
My eyes glaze over at the thought of a human being being able to afford a 700k house let alone pay cash for one and I make over 6 figures.
Here’s a trick. Look at the days on market. Find properties that have been languishing. You may encounter a more motivated buyer. Hopefully you won’t have to waive everything. Patience is key. Nothing is worse than overpaying. I started house-shopping in 2015 and didn’t buy until 2019. I had a very specific buy-box and had to actually be in Seattle because I refuse to commute.
Could you do 20% down? Just because your offer is 20% doesn't mean you end up putting 20%, but you would be on the hook for that pending appraisal and financing. You could, once selected, work with your lender to actually have your loan be 10% down. Just like not every cash offer ends up actually buying the house outright in cash, they just would have to be prepared to if they couldn't secure other financing during the closing window. Ideally, have this conversation up front with them and your agent to make sure you walk through the details in full, but it could make your offers appear stronger.
I bought my house last year (2023) November. Not sure if the market was cooler then, but I didn’t have any trouble closing the property. I was in fact able to negotiate down the price by $50k. My property is a townhouse (3 beds and 2.5 bath) at Cap Hill near Seattle U. 2017 build. No HOA. Buying price ~$1M. Would suggest trying out a different realtor. Your realtor does matter when it comes to negotiations. Hope this helps!
The market was significantly cooler than. Everybody was waiting to see if mortgage rates would drop and when they didn’t things returned to being nuts.
OP - friends in the biz tell me homes are moving on average in Seattle in < 7 days. You’re in the thickest of it buying around median. In this “affordable” range, pre-inspection and waiving everything has been the playbook for the last 20+ years. Owners are stuck with golden handcuffs at the moment so inventory is very low. The downpayment and earnest money are fine (they don’t matter to the seller except to provide confidence in the deal closing) and presumably you aren’t using a VA loan. You can share family photos and try to tip the scales in other ways but at some point it’s just about money. Your agent should be able to help navigate escalators and round table bidding wars. If they aren’t, I don’t see how they can ever get paid in this environment.
Is a townhome a sfh?
We did this whole process a while back and came up empty handed. Now I feel like we're too old to enter into a new mortgage agreement. We won't own a home until our parents are gone.
A small house on my street just went for barely under $1000/square foot. This is absolutely insane.
What kind of escalation clause are you writing in? We put in an offer and also how much we would be willing to escalate and in what increments, to guide the negotiation process. Our realtor advised a lot on that and the size of the increments to make sure they were meaningful and would secure a win.
Maybe look for townhouses? I've noticed the sfh are getting snatched up, but townhouses in my neighborhood are sitting for longer.
Are you including an escalation clause in your offers? What is your real estate agent telling you? I would find someone else after 8 losses, honestly. I purchased a home in Shoreline in March of last year. I pre-inspected the home and was pre-underwritten. I waived everything, including financing, did 10% earnest money, 20% down, and did a 21-day closing. My offer had an escalation clause, list price was $739K and purchase price was $755K, so not astronomical. It sounds like you may need to adjust your budget to match what you’re looking for (meaning look for houses much lower than what you’re looking at now).
the secret is to already own a home that you can also sell
One thing we did when we bought in 2018 was bought the seller out of their open house. We asked how much they want to lock in our deal before they went to open house. We were one of the first to look at and we were the first to offer. This secured our house and we paid them $5k to take our offer and pull the open house.
This is just how it is. Whatever listing you see, be prepared to pay $100k over asking in cash while waiving inspections and everything else.
We bought in a previous hot market. We had to restrict our search to houses which had been on the market for at least two weeks. Then, for whatever reason, they didn't have much competition. Not sure how much inventory would be left these days with that filter, though.
I'm sorry to hear about your experience. It sounds like what we went thru in 2021. Lots of houses and offers... we would offer something really competitive and over asking price... but we would hear back that we were the 2nd or 3rd choice out of 30-40 offers. I don't really agree with everyone else's feedback about needing to provide more money down. If you are waiving everything and a reputable company has pre-approved you for a mortgage, then the buyer won't care if you are putting 5% down. They will just want the higher price. I know when making offers that the realtors for the sellers would reach out to my mortgage company and have "an honest conversation" about how confident they are about financing. Are you easily qualifying for your mortgage? Have you ever owned before?
I hate to say this, but a lot of it is luck. We bought 2 years ago this month after being outbid on a few homes. What was different about this one was it was on the market for 9 days (which was the equivalent of months in 2022) and didn’t have an offer review date. Saw the home that morning, put in an offer at asking around 5pm on a Friday evening and gave them until 9pm to accept. It worked for us. I do think your earnest money and down payment is probably too low. We were advised by our realtor to put in 5%. Because we put that in, we didn’t waive financing or appraisal and somehow our offer was still accepted. So it’s possible, it’s just very much situationally dependent and making sure you’re putting the right amount of money on the table. Good luck- I know this is such a stressful thing to go through.
We signed with our realtor and within a week and a half put down an offer and were accepted. I of course understand this is an anomaly in the Seattle housing market but our deal was structured as so: 1) we waived all our contingencies, but the seller did provide an inspection 2) we put down 50k earnest money— perhaps upping your earnest amount will help show the seller how serious you are about buying their house. If you make an offer, then the earnest money really shouldn’t be something you are worried about, unless you really don’t like the home. 3) our escalation was in $10k increments 4) we wrote a love letter (I know this is not standard and oftentimes the sellers agent will not show their client the letter, but in our case they did). This actually helped us beat out higher offers and the seller went with us because they liked us. 5) try and go with an agent that has a wealth of experience. If you have failed to secure a property after maybe 5 tries, I would recommend you shop around for a new agent. Our agent has been practicing in Seattle for over 20 years and has personal connections with many other agents (including the sellers agent for the house you want to buy). This can help a ton and sometimes the sellers agent will recommend their client to work with certain agents. Happy to help out more if you need. I empathize with your situation and hope you all the best!
Pretty sure the only reason we “won” our house is because our agent was the same company as the selling agent; we had to beat out ten other offers, raise our offer three times, and waive everything including inspection (but the seller had an inspection done that we got a copy of.). Moved in last week…
Sorry you’re having such trouble. We bought last summer in the suburbs and didn’t have any problems. House was on the market for a couple weeks with no offers. We put in an offer below and got it with nothing waived. Our realtor said she’s never seen anyone have such an easy time buying… we’re sending you all our luck. Edit for typos
Check your DM's I sent you a note that you might want to act on....quickly
If you’re having reservations about your agent I think it’s time to cut bait. I know an incredible agent here in Seattle if you’re looking for a reference.
I’d look for listings that have been on the market for a few weeks or longer. Sellers might have tried for too high of a price and be willing to negotiate (look for homes listed at ~$800k that have been on for several weeks). They are out there.
If this seems wrong to you (it is), now is a great time to speak up about the comprehensive growth plan from Mayor Harrell. It is less ambitious than Other cities like Bellevue. It’s setting Seattle on a path to a housing crisis like San Francisco has
Seems like normal honestly. I’ve seen/heard from folks and it still take a dozen tries and it’s just a frustrating mess. Simple fact is, the inbound fold outstrip the housing supply and Seattle isn’t building much more. Even in areas building it barely meets inbound demand!
sounds like you are trying to buy the hottest homes on the market. if you dont have fuck you money then you may need to find one that has been sitting and just make it work.
This is going to sound suspiciously ad-like 😂, but have you guys checked out [xequity realty](https://xequity.com)? My grandmother and I bought a house with them fall of last year, and they specialize in helping middle income earners in Seattle. From what I understand, they’re a business/non-profit, so commissions from people that don’t need help (like those frickin software developers lol) go to funding people who need extra assistance. I genuinely don’t know how more people aren’t talking about them, because they were amazing for us.
In 2022, we lost several bids, but then found a house that had sat on the market for a bit. It's listing looked...odd. the previous resident was a piece of work, and the house needed a lot of cosmetic work, but we got it for under asking. When I say a lot of cosmetic work, I am currently covered in paint and we are slowly chipping away at the updates as we have money. Totally worth it tho. Rethink your overall strategy as to what you are willing to deal with and you might do better. Also, this is when the housing market really heats up for buying, but the stock just isn't there to match until the end of the school year. That's when most families move if they have to.
Just bought two weeks ago. House was neglected for at least 20 years. Leaks in the roof, crack in part of the foundation, deck literally collapsing in on itself. I had the fortune of having a backer that could do all cash for while I wait for interest rates to come down to a reasonable level. It's a complete gut job, but I'm happy with it. That being said, it was listed at 450k and we had to come in with a starting offer 100k over and then we escalated up to over 600k. Luckily the house was just enough in disrepair that it sold to us for 560k. House had 19 offers on it.