How to Make an Offer on a Home Without the Representation of an Agent

Video Transcript

"Making an offer on a home without the representation of an agent can be a difficult task. I'm Richard Blake and I'm here to help assist you in making an offer on a home. The first thing that you want to do is find out what has sold in the immediate neighborhood or the community that you are most interested in. You can do this by searching different websites or the easiest thing to do is going to be to go to your local real estate brokerage and ask them for a list of homes that have sold in the last six months, say within the zipcode of the subject property that you are looking at. From that point you want to break it down to which properties are more similar to the property you want to make the offer on, such as square footage, whether or not the property has a pool, whether or not the property has garages, you know one car garage, two car garage, the size of the lot, any amenities that the home might have, try to find other properties with in a one mile radius that have the same amenities. As far as when calculating the square footage, you usually want to use properties within twenty percent of the value range, meaning if you have a thousand square foot home, you don't want to take properties too much over twelve hundred square feet nor do you want to use properties less then eight hundred square feet. Once you have a nice list of properties that are sold within the last six months with the same amenities and the same size of the subject property you are making the offer on, that will give you an average price of what homes are selling for in that neighborhood. From here you can decide whether or not to make a slightly lower offer, or slightly lower, I'm sorry or slightly higher then what the average price is based on the market condition, meaning if it's a buyers market or sellers market. At this point once you've decided a purchase price you go to your local real estate lawyer and have him draft up the offer for you. It's important that you do this, because each state is a little bit different and the requirements for contracts will be a little bit different based upon the location of the home. Tell the local real estate agent what price point you've decided upon have them write up the papers and submit the offer that way. Again you can get this information from your local brokerage and happy home hunting. I'm Richard Blake have a great day."