Beware of Wholesaler Investors Buying Your Home
When selling your home to a cash home buyer here in Lancaster, this is really important upfront. There are legitimate cash home buyers that have the money to buy your home, and they have every intent on closing on your property. And then there’s what is called wholesalers, and this is what you want to be really careful of. What a wholesaler does is they’ll put your property under contract, and then they’re, what we call, wholesaling that contract, selling that contract to somebody else. And if they don’t find somebody else that will pay them money in order to assign that contract from them, they could potentially walk away from the deal and leave you as a seller out there hanging. So it’s really important.
When you’re dealing with a cash home buyer, there are a couple of questions that you want to ask. Number one, on the contract, if it says “and/or assigns”, that means they could potentially assign that contract to somebody else, and they’re not the ones buying it. The other thing that you want to pay attention to is to get what we call POF, proof of funds. Get proof that they’ve got enough money or the resources in order to buy your property, because a wholesaler, they don’t have the money, and that’s why they’re tying your property up, putting it under contract, and then wanting to sell that contract to somebody else. And if they don’t get it done, they’re MIA and they’re walking away from the deal. So it’s really important to distinguish between a legitimate cash buyer and what we call a wholesaler that could potentially walk away from the deal.
Get Earnest Money When Selling Your Home
The second thing you want to pay close attention to when working with a cash home buyer within the contract is the earnest money. You want to make sure that the cash home buyer is putting up earnest money. So when they open up escrow, they’re depositing earnest money to the title company.
This is really important because if there’s no earnest money and they decide that they don’t want the property, they can easily walk away and they’re not out anything. So you want some skin in the game.
The earnest money is usually protected during what we call the inspection period, where if they do cancel the contract, they can get that earnest money back. So you want a tight inspection time and then you want earnest money that is non-refundable once the cash home buyer is through the inspection period.
Go With a Local Lancaster Cash Home Buyer with a Good Reputation
The third thing to consider when selling to a Lancaster cash home buyer is you want to make sure that they’re local right here in Lancaster. There are a lot of cash buyers that are nationwide cash buyers, and they don’t understand our local market. And it’s much easier to deal with a local cash home buyer because they’ve got the local connections. They typically can move at a much faster rate. So really important to go with somebody here local.
The other thing that you want to consider is reputation. Make sure that they’ve got a good reputation. There are a lot of cash home buyers out there that don’t have good reputations that will tie your property up and then try to renegotiate or finagle their way out of the deal. So again, local is important, and reputation, very important that they’ve got a good reputation.
Renegotiate The Home Sales Price
Another thing to consider when dealing with a Lancaster cash home buyer is when you’re negotiating the contract, you want to make sure that the agreed-upon sales price is what it is. There are a lot of cash home buyers out there that will agree to a sales price, and then during the inspections, they’ll beat you down in price and come back and try to renegotiate the price.
So you want to be clear upfront and try to get that inspection upfront and out of the way, and minimize that inspection period, and just let them know that you’re not willing to renegotiate the price because they’ll tie, they’ll string out the inspection process. They’ll make a longer inspection process to string you out, and then they’ll try to beat you up on price. So it’s really important to have a tight timeline in terms of that inspection and just make sure that they see the property upfront, and they’re not going to try to beat you up on price after they’ve already got the property under contract.
Get a Cash Offer From We Buy Lancaster Houses
If you’re interested in selling your home as-is, cash, on your desired date, hassle-free, We Buy Lancaster Houses would love the opportunity to sit down with you and present you with an offer.
There are a couple of different ways to do that. You can fill out the form below or just give us a call at 717-715-0010.