farrah.wilder

It is not common practice to have a home inspection before making an offer. Unless you are buying a property at auction, where you must inspect before bidding, you should wait until your offer is accepted before having an inspection done. If the seller doesn't accept your offer, you will have spent money that you did not have to spend. Also, another offer might be accepted while you are having your inspection done, and you will have lost money and the property.

If you make an offer, make sure that your contract allows for a period of inspection, during which you can cancel and receive your deposit back if you find defects that make you no longer want to purchase the property. That is the standard practice.

Good luck! - Mon Aug 25 2008, 13:32

Hi Candy,

I'm not sure that I understand your question because I don't know what you mean by "assigned." However, the time that it takes from when an offer is submitted to the seller's lender and the lender returns with a decision can vary significantly. In my experience, it can take anywhere from one to five months from when the lender first receives an offer.

There are many factors that cause this delay. First, if the seller's agent isn't experienced in short sales, they may not know the procedure for getting the process started with the bank. Also, if the agent isn't in constant contact with the lender, that can slow things significantly. In addition, if the lender is overwhelmed or unorganized, that can cause a big delay. Finally, there are many other forces such as investors, second lenders, etc that can work silently behind the scenes to cause big delays.

After all of this delay, the lender may decide to foreclose if they don't get an offer that they find to be acceptable. - Mon Aug 25 2008, 13:24

You might feel that I'm biased since I'm a Realtor but, since I care sabout my relationship with my clients and their happiness with their future homes, I largely ignore these incentives or the amount of commission. Incentives are a nice bonus but I want my clients to find the homes that are best for them regardless of any bonus to myself. Furthermore, since they are on automatic e-mail updates, they see the houses and they let me know which ones they want to see.

I could see these incentives working in a market where there are so many similar houses on the market, there isn't time to see them all. However, I still think that each home is unique.

I hope you find a great real estate agent. There are some wonderful ones out there. - Mon Aug 25 2008, 13:11

Hi Sandra - If you want to send me your e-mail address and zip , I can plug it into the MLS and e-mail you the results. My e-mail address is farrah.wilder@prurealty.com. Good luck! - Mon Aug 25 2008, 11:52

It is pretty standard practice for a bank to look at multiple offers (all of which may have been accepted by the seller contingent on lender approval) when they are considering whether to allow the seller to do a short sale. The banks may not even allow the seller to sell without assurances that the property has been marketed after an offer comes in because they want to be sure that they are selling the property for the highest price. If they don't have the assurance that they are getting as much as possible to mitigate the loss they will experience in writing off part of the loan, they will foreclose.

Unfortunately, I don't believe that there is a law that prohibits this. The lender basically acts as a lienholder yet they wield significant power here because they do not have to allow the seller to sell.

My advice would be to see if you can find out from the listing agent what the highest offer is and, if possible, increase your offer so that it is higher than the highest offer.

Here in California, we have an addendum to the purchase agreement that informs buyers of the issues that you bring up. Because the listing price usually has nothing to do with what the bank is willing to allow the property to sell for and because I've had so many banks decide to foreclose even though I had the highest offer, I encourage all but my investor clients or my clients who really do not need to be certain about the property that they are placing an offer on to avoid short sales. - Fri Aug 22 2008, 13:24