How to Save a Failed Home Sale

Many homes that are in the process of being sold are often hung up for a variety of reasons. In the year 2011, 33% of real estate agents experienced contract failures, and that number is 8% higher than in 2010. Though this situation is stressful, you should not lose hope yet; patience and creativity can save your home from a failed sale.

Is the buyer experiencing financing issues? Most potential buyers planned on buying a home with the expectation that they can be approved for a mortgage loan. After discovering that the lender has just turned them down, the buyers often lose hope. Problems such as credit scores, job loss, and documentation problems and delays are the major reasons why a borrower can lose interest in buying a home. Though the process may take a long time, and the buyer may seem to have abandoned the deal, the seller or homeowner should still keep a line of communication open with the prospective buyers. In the end, the bank (or another bank perhaps) may still approve the loan.

Did your property receive a low appraisal? Most of the time, home sales suffer from low appraisals when an appraiser valued the property in an amount that is smaller than the contract price between the buyer and the seller. This can be a problem to the seller, especially if they decline to reduce the price. This will usually cause buyers to back out of the deal. One solution for this is to ask the appraiser to re-appraise the property, and try to reconsider some factors. This rarely happens, and it can be more difficult to achieve. If this doesn’t work, there is no other solution but to cut the asking price of your property.

Are there necessary repairs needed? In some cases, the buyer and the seller don’t agree on one thing – repairing the home before the buyer purchases it. The seller usually doesn’t want to spend any more money on something that they are getting rid of. On the other hand, the buyer usually doesn’t want to buy a property that needs a lot or repairs, because it is an additional expense for them. This can be a problem, but can be fixed if both the seller and the buyer agree on reasonable fixes.