By Alyssa Isenstein Krueger, July 16, 2021
By Alyssa Isenstein Krueger, July 16, 2021
My buyer Clayton was referred to me by some of my favorite past clients ever, so I knew he was going to be great to work with. His ideal home would be in North Portland where he has lived for a long time as a renter, and would have the space and bedroom count to be able to comfortably rent out a room or two to roommates. He lost out on 2 houses, but they were not the best houses for him anyway. And when a great 4 bedroom house (2 beds on the main floor and 2 beds upstairs) came on the market he went to the open house and met the listing agent who was super impressed by how kind Clayton is and how through of a job he did looking at the house (he even went into the crawl space!). He loved the house and we wrote up an offer, and thanks to his letter and the listing agent explaining to her seller how awesome Clayton is, the seller wanted to sell to Clayton, but with another offer on the table that was over $100,000 over list price, the seller went with the crazy high offer.
Within a few days though, that buyer came back through with her mom and came to the realization that she was paying way too much for the house. That buyer tried to renegotiate with the seller to a lower price, but the seller wasn’t pleased at all so the listing agent came back to me to ask if Clayton was willing to add $30k to his initial offer amount, and Clayton was not willing to do that. So back on the market they went, and Clayton went back to another open house there and still loved it. We wrote up another offer which was higher than his first offer, but not as high as the seller had wanted to keep the house from going on the market. We waited for the weekend to be over to see if any more offers came in, and of course on the last day another offer did come in. Thankfully the listing agent was still rooting for Clayton, so they came back to us and asked Clayton if he would revise his offer amount higher by $15k to match the other offer. That seemed entirely reasonable so we upped his offer and the seller accepted.
The inspection went really well, and with the exception of a really bad appraisal that came in slightly low, the transaction was otherwise smooth as could be! When I met Clayton at the house to hand over the keys, he seemed slightly bewildered and in awe that he pulled off buying such a great house, but most importantly, he was super excited.