Buying a home

The list price is a seller's opinion. Sometimes it is a good one. Often it is the number their agent agreed to in order to win the listing, or a number that made sense eight months ago and has not been revisited since.

What I do instead is pull the closed comparable sales. Not actives, not pendings with unknown terms, closed sales. Then I adjust for the things that actually move value in that submarket: finished square footage, lot, condition, layout, how long each comp sat before it sold, and what concessions the seller paid that never show in the headline price.

The finished square footage trap is worth knowing about. Listings routinely quote total square footage including an unfinished basement. If you divide the price by that total, the house looks like a bargain on a per foot basis. Back the unfinished space out and the same house can look twenty percent expensive. This is the single most common way a buyer talks themselves into overpaying.

You will see the comps and the math, not just my conclusion. If I cannot show you why, I have not done the work.

An inspection report is forty pages long and most of it is noise. Loose outlet covers, a missing downspout extension, caulking. Those are not why we are there.

We are there for the things that cost five figures and cannot be undone: foundation movement, water getting somewhere it should not, roof age against roof condition, the electrical panel type, the sewer line on anything built before the seventies, and evidence of work done without permits.

Unpermitted work is its own category. A finished basement that was never permitted is not just paperwork. It can mean bedrooms that do not legally count as bedrooms because they lack egress, an appraisal that will not credit the space, and a future buyer who gets the same bad news from their own inspector. The seller saying it is fine is not the same as it being fine.

My job during that window is to tell you which findings are normal wear on a home of that age, which ones are negotiable, and which ones mean we walk. You decide. I will tell you plainly when I think a house is wrong for you, including when that costs me the commission.

An appraisal protects the lender. That is its actual job. It happens to protect you too, but only from one specific thing: borrowing more than the house is worth.

It does not inspect anything. It does not tell you whether the furnace has two years left. It does not tell you whether you are overpaying in any sense the lender does not care about. An appraiser can come in exactly at contract price on a house with a cracked foundation.

What matters is what happens when it comes in low. On one purchase last year the appraisal landed $59,000 under contract and the lender threatened to kill the deal entirely. That is the moment where most transactions either collapse or the buyer panics and covers the gap in cash. Neither is necessary. There is a negotiation to be had, and knowing the appraisal timeline and your rights under it is what gives you room to have it.

Before you ever waive an appraisal contingency, you should know exactly what you are agreeing to pay if the number comes back short. I will put that figure in front of you in dollars.

Buyers think an offer is a number. Sellers read it as a package, and the thing they care about most is not always the money. It is certainty. They want the offer that closes, on time, without falling apart in week three.

So the offer has levers beyond price: the closing date, whether the seller can stay in the house a few days after, how much earnest money and when it goes hard, the length of the due diligence period, the financing deadline, the appraisal terms, who pays what at closing, and what you are asking them to fix.

Every one of those is worth something to the other side, and several of them cost you nothing. Flexibility on a possession date is free to you and can be worth more than ten thousand dollars to a seller who has not found their next house yet.

Each lever also carries risk when you give it up. That is the part that gets skipped. I will tell you what each one costs you before you agree to it, in plain numbers, not in the abstract.

This is the moment most buyers lose. Eight offers on the table, a deadline at five o'clock, and the instinct is to throw money at it and hope. That is the expensive way to compete, and it is usually not what wins.

Price is only one of the things a seller is weighing. What they actually want is certainty. They want to know the offer they accept is the one that closes, on time, without renegotiation halfway through. Most buyers never think about that, which is exactly where the opening is.

So before we write anything, I call the listing agent. Not to negotiate. To listen. What matters to this seller? Do they need a specific closing date? Are they buying something else and need time to move? Have they already had a deal fall apart? Is the seller a builder, an investor, or a family working around a school calendar? That five minute conversation regularly tells me more than the listing ever will, and most agents never make the call.

Then we build the offer around what we learned. Sometimes the winning move is a shorter due diligence period. Sometimes it is letting them stay in the home a few days after closing. Sometimes it is how the earnest money is structured, or a specific commitment on the appraisal. Sometimes the seller cares more about a clean closing date than an extra ten thousand dollars, and we win by being easy rather than expensive.

And here is the part I want you to hear clearly. Every one of those levers has a cost, and I will tell you exactly what each one costs you before you agree to it. Waiving or shortening a protection is a real risk, not a formality. My job is to lay out what you are giving up, what you gain, and what happens in the worst case, and then let you decide. I do not push people into terms they do not understand.

Winning an offer you should not have signed is not winning. The goal is to get the house on terms you would still be comfortable with three months from now.

A Utah purchase contract is full of levers built specifically to protect you. Deadlines, contingencies, cancellation rights, the due diligence period, the financing deadline, the appraisal provision.

Most buyers and sellers never learn what those do until the moment they needed one and did not use it. They are also not permanent. Each one has a date attached, and once that date passes your position changes, usually along with your earnest money.

Before we make the first move I will walk you through the board: which deadline is which, what you can still walk away from and what you cannot, and where your money is at each stage. Nobody I represent should ever look like an amateur in their own transaction.

One no is not the answer. It is one underwriter's read of one file against one set of guidelines.

I have worked with a researcher paid through a university stipend who had been turned down by her credit union, a national lender, a local lender and several investors. She had the income. She just did not fit anyone's template. We found a builder's lender willing to underwrite the whole picture rather than one line on a form, and she closed on a townhome in American Fork where she lives today with her family.

Another client had been at her job three months, with thin credit history and thin work history, and had collected rejection after rejection. Same answer from me. Same result for her.

Sometimes the honest answer really is not yet, and I will tell you that rather than run you around for six months. But being told no by one lender is worth a second conversation, and that conversation is free.