There is much more to creating a winning offer than just providing the right price. From ensuring your financial stability to including details in your offer letter that will make it stand out, you want to do everything you can to ensure that sellers take notice of your offer. Continue reading to learn four tips for writing winning offers on a Media, Pennsylvania home.

Before you even start looking at Media, PA homes for sale, you will want to make sure your finances are in order. You will want to start saving for a down payment and working on your credit long before you start looking for your next home. Once you believe your finances are in order, an additional step you can take toward writing a winning offer on a home is to secure loan pre-approval from a lender. Getting pre-approved for a loan serves two different purposes. The first is that the pre-approval will give you a good idea upfront of what your housing budget will be. Depending on how much of a loan you qualify for, you will have to look within different price ranges. Having this step completed up front will prevent you from wasting your time as well as the time of the person trying to sell their home.

The second benefit to receiving preapproval from a lender is that pre-approval will make you look like a serious buyer. If you write an offer on a home with a nearly guaranteed amount, barring any changes in your financial situation, the seller will take your offer seriously and will look at it more closely than someone who does not have pre-approval. Again, this will prevent you from wasting anyone’s time throughout the process.

One detail to keep in mind while seeking pre-approval is that you could get prequalified instead. While prequalification could be helpful, pre-approval is going to be a more accurate representation of what loan amount you can receive. Lenders will take many additional financial details into consideration for pre-approval than for prequalification.

Before you consider writing an offer on a home, you will want to do your research. Take some time to research the local market. You should look at Media, PA homes that have sold recently, as well as homes that have been on the market for any length of time. While you can do this research on your own, consider working with a professional real estate agent at this point. They will be able to look into more details of the housing market, as well as have more experience with evaluating properties. This research will help assure you that you are offering an amount that is both competitive to the market and fair for the home you are getting.

You may want to consider doing a little research on the seller, too. You don’t want to dive too deep into the seller’s personal information, but it will help if you can understand their motive for selling their piece of Media, PA real estate. Maybe they sell quite a bit of real estate that they are flipping for a profit, or maybe they are looking to sell their home quickly because they need to relocate. All of these details will help you write a winning offer for a home.

In order to write a winning offer for a home, you will want to understand contingencies. These are going to be provisions that the buyer or seller can put in place that need to be met before the sale of a home. While some contingencies on your end can provide you with some protection throughout the process, sellers will often look more seriously at bids that have fewer contingencies placed upon them. A financing contingency would give you a certain amount of time to ensure that you can receive a loan for the mortgage. This contingency provides you with protection but also may be seen negatively by the seller because it gives you a legal way to back out of the sale without any repercussions on your finances.

You will likely want to include a home inspection contingency to ensure that everything is as well maintained as the seller claims. While this is an important step in the process of buying a home, consider the repairs that a home inspector notices. If you run into something that needs to be repaired for a few hundred dollars, keep in mind that it might not be worth negotiating with the seller because of the cost of the repair compared to the price of the home. Be flexible throughout the process. You want the process of buying one of the Media, PA homes for sale to be easy, and so does the seller.

Finally, when you are submitting an offer letter for a piece of Media, PA real estate, you want to make the letter itself stand out from your competition. Consider how many other offer letters the seller might receive. You want yours to be noticeable. Think of this as a resume. This is just one of many documents the seller may see on any given day. Take some time to explain the features of the house that you love. Talk about the storage, the kitchen, the backyard, whatever grabbed your attention when you viewed the house. Be sure to focus on the features of the house, though, as it is illegal for sellers to make decisions based on the protected characteristics of the buyer. Make a connection with the seller without providing too many details about yourself and your family. The last detail that you will want to consider to make your letter stand out is providing the seller with a hard copy. Everyone receives way too many emails and digital communications. Not everyone receives hard copies of items. By providing the seller with a hard copy of your offer, you will be assured that they are receiving it in their hands without being buried among the many spam emails they likely receive every day.

When you are ready to start looking for the perfect piece of Media, PA real estate, you want to work with a professional real estate agent that has years of experience and employs the skills necessary to meet your needs throughout your home buying process. Jenna Leggette has more than 13 years of real estate experience and works to understand the wants and needs of each of her clients to find them exactly what they need in a home. Reach out to Jenna directly when you are ready to start looking for your dream home.