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Sellers Assistance?

We got an offer on our house (full asking price) but they are asking for seller assist of 6% has anyone else had this type of offer, or make this type of offer.  We really didn't know anything about this "practice" until now.

Re: Sellers Assistance?

  • We requested seller's assist on our house. We bought when it was very much a buyer's market and our agent suggested throwing it in there to see if it would work out. It seems like it can be a fairly common request anymore!
  • We got sellers assistance when we bought our first home. It was the same situation... full asking w/ sellers assist. I believe it's not an uncommon offer coming from a first time buyer.
  • So sellers assist is them asking you to pay some of the closing costs.  Your realtor should be able to tell you what that net offer really is (Offer price-dollar amount the 6% works out to) so you can fully consider that offer.  All of our offers included sellers assist and usually a lower price we had to counter. So IMO, full asking price but with sellers assist isn't a bad offer. 
  • We did this when we bought 6 yrs ago - full asking price + $5K sellers assist, which brought it to $5K under asking price, technically. That went to closing costs, so we still financed the higher number.

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    My three sons!

  • Sellers assistance is basically that the buyers need some cash to buy the house and you are (hopefully) making money off of the sale and would therefore have some $$.

     It would be the same thing to sell a house for 100,000 and give 6% seller's assist as it would be to sell a house for $94,000. It's basically 6,000 less than what you wanted.

    you COULD negotiate that you would be willing to do 3% seller's assist.

  • We tried to negotiate a lower assist, but they need full assist - on one hand it has only been on the market for 18 days, but on the other it is the middle of September.  We definately missed the peak selling season!
  • imagellk1:
    We tried to negotiate a lower assist, but they need full assist - on one hand it has only been on the market for 18 days, but on the other it is the middle of September.  We definately missed the peak selling season!

    You could suggest a higher offer price, and do the full 6% assist. So if you were at 100k and they wanted the 6% you could counter at 103k and do the 6% assist. 

    But like I said before, I don't think it is a bad offer.  I know we listed our house at a fair price, but expected there to be negotiations. We did not live in a place where full asking price was going to be  agreed upon. people want a "deal".  And I hated showing my house. So if a couple grand wasn't a deal breaker for me. Your next offer may still include sellers assist but also a lower offer price as well.

     

    Good luck!

  • We just sold our house a few weeks ago. The buyers offered above-asking price with a sellers assist for that additional amount... ie, we still got our full asking price on the house. If you believe your house will appraise for a little more than it's listed at you have the option to counter with a higher price, still providing the assistance. Many first-time home buyers don't have the funds to pay the closing costs on their own so this has become pretty common, I think.
  • I agree, if you're anxious to sell I'd consider it as long as you can afford to pay the 6% out of what you make on the house. I'd also consider what kind of loan it is. With FHA loans, which a lot of first time buyers have, you may end up having to lower your price if their appraisal comes in lower than the asking price.

    Also, you have to think about how much interest you've had. We turned down an offer before we accepted one because we had a ton of traffic and a bunch of appointments scheduled, and we hadn't even talked about an open house yet. And we were only on the market a week at that point. So we were pretty confident that we could get what we wanted (which at that point was negociable on the price but not the timeline). It's a bit of a gamble selling a house. I'm not a gambler, so we played it a little safe.

    We also knew what we wanted/needed to get out of it given how long we'd been in the house, how much work we'd done, etc. We didn't want to take a loss, but we also were realistic and didn't need the money in order to get the financing for our new house, so we just needed to break even and get under contract so that we could go back to actually living in our house!

  • Our buyers ask for sellers assist.  They had to buy the house for more than we were asking to compensate for the large amount of sellers assist they were asking for.  We really made no money on the house.  But after a year on the market, we had to take it. 
     
  • I agree with the others -- full price + seller's assist is a good offer.  We offered less than list + seller's assist for our new house and got that.  We also gave the person who bought our old place seller's assist.  She was FHA and asked for max FHA allowed seller's assist.

    Hopefully your realtor gives you all of the paperwork that shows your options and what you'll walk away with.

  • when we put an offer on our house we offered full sale price plus full sellers assist (6%). the sellers countered with full sellers assist but jacked the sale price. that pissed me off royally and we walked away. the sellers ended up coming back and offering the original sale price and 4% sellers assist, which we accepted.

    when we sold the house the first offer was 12k under our asking price and full sellers assist. we declined without a counter. the buyer returned to offer full sale price and asked for full sellers assist. we agreed to those terms.

    sellers assist is very common since closing costs can't be financed anymore (some manage to do it, but i have no idea how. we were told no). they were costs that were ultimately coming out of the profit from the sale so it wasn't like we had to fork over the $ from our bank account. so even though really it's the same thing, it didn't bother us as much since we were still walking away with what we felt was an acceptable profit given the fact that we had only owned the home for 10 months before putting it on the market and that it had been on the market for 8 months.

    Thanks to our wonderful RE our family is complete!
    DS #1 10.12.12
    DS #2 10.24.14

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  • DH and I are house hunting and plan on offering full asking with seller's assist.  The amount of seller's assist depends greatly on how soon we find a house that we want.  Right now we are kind of short on cash to cover closing.  After taxes and stuff we should be able to handle more of it.  But if we find a house we really want to be our home before then thats the route we are hoping to go.
    Warning No formatter is installed for the format bbhtml
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