Tips To Winning a Bid War In Todays Market

According to the National Association of Realtors, more than 6.02 million homes were sold in the United States in 2019. Despite these millions of successful home sales, finding your dream home can still be difficult. This is especially true for the modern housing market, which has fewer listings than ever before.

Once you’ve set your eyes on that perfect domicile, you’ll go above and beyond to get your hands on it. When shopping for homes for sale in New Castle, you should be prepared for bidding wars. According to a Redfin survey from Jan. 2021, 56% of all active home shoppers reported facing bidding wars.

For reference, a National Association of Home Builders survey from last year found that just 19% of prospective homebuyers said they’d been outbid recently. Considering this market trend, which seems to be nationwide per recent reports from South Carolina, Oregon, and Washington, it’s never been more important to prepare for bidding wars.

Know That Time Is of the Essence

According to the aforementioned Redfin survey, over half of all recently listed homes are being sold in two weeks or less. In the past, hopeful homebuyers could afford to put off house tours and meetings until the weekend. Now, you should be able to meet real estate agents and private sellers as soon as possible.

If you can’t show up when agents or sellers want you to, go out of your way to make amends. For example, ask if you can still meet them virtually. At the very least, be prepared for a three-way phone call.

Get Mortgage Preapproval

As you already know, most prospective homebuyers get mortgages to buy homes. After all, who can afford to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars at once? Most of us won’t ever have hundreds of thousands of dollars at once.

Even though the rate of homebuyers using mortgages to buy homes was at a 13-year low in 2019, 62.9% of house shoppers still use mortgages to finance their real estate purchases.

If you don’t have enough cash to compete with all-cash buyers, don’t worry about it. Regardless of your financial status, you should always get preapproved for mortgages in hopes of ending bidding wars before they start. While all-cash buyers would still hold priority, mortgage preapproval is an often-underestimated real estate buying strategy that you should take advantage of.

Kick Contingencies to the Curb

Prospective homebuyers, real estate agents, and home sellers all require conditions to be met before they’ll sign off on home sales. Although they’re used in every area of business, these conditions, which are known as contingencies, are especially common in real estate.

In today’s high-demand, low-supply market, you should be conservative with contingencies. While it’s generally not a good idea to go against your gut instinct or accept excessive financial risk, you might have to eliminate all contingencies to find a home in this climate.