Why Offer Timing Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Well, if you listen to the episodes about what happens when you buy a house, this is the episode before that episode of how to make an offer to the agent. Hello, Megan.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

Hello. We're doing things out of order today.

Telling The Agent You Want It

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Yes, that's okay. It gets people excited and curious. So how do people make an agent an offer to the agent?

The Five Details For Drafting

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Okay. So first of all, it's funny, the old school buyers used to go through houses with a blank face and say negative things about the house to throw the agent off the scent of their interest, right? But buyers these days realize that we're actually kind of trying to help them. Like there's a house, we're trying to help sell it, and they want to buy. So it's pretty straightforward. All you have to do is say to the agent, I like this house. And we would encourage you to say that. Then if you decide to buy it, contact us. Like we can make it as easy as possible. So as soon as somebody says to me, and they might be at the open home, or they might be, you know, during a phone call afterwards, or they might just ring me randomly and say, I would like to make an offer on XYZ House. And I say to them, I need five things from you. And I'll send you a text with them written down because I know that you know I'm pretty detail oriented, but it's nice to have it in the little list. So we need to know their legal names that they'd like to buy under. So it could be their actual names, it could be a trust, it could be a business name, whatever it they want on the contract. So if they're, you know, like their proper names, not their nicknames, or they're shortened John.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

So it can't be Mickey Mouse, it has to be Michael Mouse.

Conditions KiwiSaver And Lawyer Checks

Signing Fast With DocuSign

Why Draft Contracts Help Finance

SPEAKER_01 1:47

Yeah, not John Jonathan, sort of thing. Yeah, yeah. Um, so the legal names, the amount that they'd like to pay for their deposit, and we usually ask them if they're using Kiwi Saver at that point as well, because there's a few little extra tweaks that we can make to the contract. A settlement date. Now, this is the ideal settlement date. Obviously, if it doesn't suit the vendors, they can negotiate negotiate on that, or we can say, hey, the vendors would prefer this date if you can manage it. So we try and give them a little pointer there, and it should be two weeks minimum to settle. Thank you for listening to my earlier episode with the Kiwi Saver and the you know the mortgage finance and everything. And then conditions. Now, some buyers, especially if they're first home buyers, they'll be like, What conditions should I put down? Now, we can't give legal advice, but there are some classic conditions like a limb or a builder's report. Finance is a big one. If they're using Kiwi Saver, we put on a Kiwi Saver condition. Sometimes, sometimes we just use the finance one. Depends if they're using it for their deposit or not. So we we put down on a cross lease, we always get a title check as well. And of course, the classic, get your lawyer to check this because I'm not a legal advisor. We write up these contracts, but we always put that condition. The lawyer needs time to check this because we're human, you know, we need to make sure that somebody qualified as checking it. And so those are the five things: the name, the deposit amount, the settlement date, the conditions, and the lawyer's details. What we don't ask is what price they want to pay. Because that's personal, right? So we get all the stuff over to them, they put on the price. We will eventually see it. It's not going to be a secret forever, but it's up to them what price they want to do. They don't have to disclose that straight up to us. And then sometimes we end up with a partnership where one's working in town, one's traveling, or they're just doing different jobs, or one's on a building site, or like can't get away, doesn't have access to a scanner, and they're like, they're one of those people that want to make an early offer, or they, you know, they might be quite close to a deadline or an auction date, and they're kind of like, we need to make this work. So we have a thing called DocuSign, and it's basically an electronic signing tool, and we can put in their names and we can get all the little signatures in the right places for them to help them out. I know when we were buying our house, I made the agent stand with me while we signed all the paperwork just because George was about to go away on a business trip, and I was like, I don't want a signature to not be there. Yeah. And for me to have to track him down in like Taranaki or somewhere. So the agent witnessed all our little signature bits, and then we wrote the price on later and put it in the tender box because we bought our house by tender. Yeah. So yeah, that's effectively what we do. We can turn that around within half an hour. Sometimes an hour depends on, you know, if we've got dinner to feed our children or something. I I usually do that while George feeds the kids, and we can turn it around pretty quick to get it to people. If they want to make an offer, we try and make that possible.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

And I love that because that helps us to push it along with the banks, because a lot of banks may not accept an application if it doesn't contain sales and purchase agreement. And I often say to the people, it just needs to be a draft at that point. It does need to be fully signed. But if there is no sales and purchase agreement on auction pack, then the banks normally will bounce back the application and say, sorry, uh pipeline is closed to any pre-approvals. We only want people that are serious about a certain property. So that really, really helps us.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Oh, that's good. It's always nice that we can make your job easier.

SPEAKER_00 5:27

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

Do agents charge for that? No, no, gosh, no, no. I I used to work in a bank, so I'm familiar with it, but yeah, I just do it for the love of it and to make it easier for people. But that's why I always put that condition on that the lawyer has to check it, because we just want to make sure it's perfect.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

Absolutely. I like that because a lot of um clients rack up heaps of legal bills because the first property may not be the one that they will buy.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

Um, because they might have missed out on the offer or whatever. So often we find that the third property may be the one they buy. But if they continue to go back and forth with the lawyers uh about the sales and purchase agreement, that's two thousand dollars per contract sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 6:08

So yeah. It depends on the fee structure, doesn't it? Because some lawyers do a first-time buyers pack where they're like, okay, you can send me unlimited amounts of condition, you know, contracts, and others charge per I want to know who those lawyers are. Well, I'm going back to when I was a first-time buyer, so it might have changed.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

I'll break your heart, it's no longer a thing.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Oh no, that sucked. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

Yeah. I did try to reach out to a few lawyers about it because we we did have a fantastic lawyer that we had that with, but unfortunately that lawyer's out of action at the moment. And once that lawyer is back, I think we will have it back. But for now, we just sort of stuck with those lawyers that do charge an hourly rate or whatever to check over the sales and purchase agreement. So if the agents can take the heavy lifting out of it and that reduces the time the lawyer spends on that, that's a win-win.

Written Offers And Cutting Legal Costs

SPEAKER_01 6:56

It's true. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's it's pretty much an admin job creating the contract. It's the expert job is reviewing the contract, I guess. It's quite nice as well. We say to people, hey, like, let's put a contract together because they're like, oh, can you just ask the homeowner if they'll take this? Well, we don't see that as a valid offer. If we're gonna present an offer, we'll present any offer in writing to a vendor.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

So we may as well test out the price first and then do the due diligence and try and save them some fees. But yeah, it's it's just we enjoy that, you know. It just helps people out a little.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Love that. Thank you so much, Megan. Really appreciate your time today. This has been very, very useful. Oh, yeah, excellent. I'm glad to help. See you later.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

Thanks.