The Waiting Part

One of the common threads that keeps real estate exciting is the number of cliffhangers along the way. 

Sure, there are those rare times when everything just flows together and there isn’t any drama, but there are multiple factors which dictate, at multiple stages of the process, that one or more of the parties involved will end up on the edge of their seats, wondering how things are going to turn out.

For the seller, their initial suspense generally gets underway with the often prolonged stage of getting the property ready, and in extreme cases this can take weeks or even months as we coordinate with the various vendors and decisions involved. 

A current example of this is my commercial listing in Harvey West coming up on its one-year anniversary which has been through the full gamut of environmental testing and clean-up before it can be sold. In fact, the sellers just signed an extension and we are still at least two months away from being able to put it on the open market. 

Once the preparations have been completed and the price has been set, then it’s on to the next cliffhanger as we find out how the market responds, often punctuated by the date for reviewing offers when we discover how many buyers want the property.

For the buyer’s journey, the suspense sometimes begins with figuring out what they want and where to look for it, and this is often accompanied by the search for an agent who can be in it for the long haul and who can also do a good job for them. 

Perhaps the most dramatic of real estate cliffhangers is the wait to find out which offer ends up being the one that gets picked in a multiple offer situation, and with our local housing inventory currently hovering at around a 2.1-month supply, this is happening more often than not.

From there, once the parties find themselves in escrow with one another, hopefully the seller and their agent have done a good job eliminating as many unknowns as possible with a thorough inspection and disclosure package. All the same, it is not uncommon for the buyer and their agent to unearth additional information during the due diligence process that can very quickly thrust the transaction back into the unknown. 

Sometimes a transaction also hinges on factors beyond either side’s control, as is the case with our current escrow on a large property in the South County where we are awaiting word of whether the approved funding for a Land Trust to purchase the property as a preserve will survive the State’s budget cuts being announced at the end of the month.