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Incentives To See, Incentives To Buy–Such Is The Way Of The Buyer’s Market
November 7th, 2006 categories: Tampa Florida, Tampa Real Estate, Tips for Sellers
Incentives abound everywhere you look for Tampa area real estate. Open house signs, barely visible 18 months ago are now the norm on street corners. And commissions on the buyer agent side are up as sellers compete for the few buyers that are actively looking and need to buy now. Open houses are certainly more involved these days as food, cocktails, etc. are offered to get agents and/or their buyers to come have a look.
Here’s a quick look at some of the more noticeable incentives:
- Palms of Beach Park (South Tampa) (one of my favorite south Tampa conversions) is hosting an open house with “food, wine and drinks” this week. This is a small conversion of a 1960’s apartment building. Very retro with terrazzo flooring, large sliding glass doors, brick walls, etc.
- Windsor Club Condos (Wesley Chapel) is offering “live free for a year”, in which the buyer can rent for a year and then have all rental payments applied towards ownership.
- Equestrain Park Condos (New Tampa) is offering 6% back to the buyers to use in a number of different ways (closing costs, upgrades, etc.)
- Another condo converter is offering 7% commission on the first sale, 8% on the second and 10% on the third to buyer’s agents.
- Lennar homes is offering a Ford Mustang with purchase of certain homes.
And that’s just a small sampling. Competition among sellers to get the attention of the very few buyers out there is fierce. In the seller’s market of recent years, buyers had to ask for some of the things that are being offered these days.
If you’re a seller of a single family home, here are a few incentive ideas that may get buyers’ and/or their agents’ attention:
- Offer to pay some of your buyer’s closing costs. This will help attract a larger pool of prospective buyers. There may be some buyers out there with great credit but little cash for the down payment and closing costs/pre-paids. Maybe your buyers would like to keep some $$ in their pocket to be able to buy furniture, appliances, a new Tiki Bar, etc.
- Offer to buy down (pay points) the interest rate on your buyer’s mortgage. This can be a permanent or temporary buydown. For instance, if you offer a buydown of 2 points for the first year of your buyers’ ownership, they will have a substantially lower monthly payment during that first year. Maybe they are expecting a boost in income 8 months down the road, so the temporary lower payment may just do the trick.
- Offer to have the home painted or the carpeting replaced. If it needs it, you’d have been wise to do this before placing the home for sale, but again, for the buyers that want to minimize out of pocket expenditures, this can go a long way.
- Make sure you and/or your agent are offering a competitive amount of compensation to agents representing buyers. Unfortunately, the way the system works currently, some agents may stay away if you’re offering less than the competition.
- Selling a condo? Offer to pay a year’s worth (MOL) of your buyers’ condo association fees. Again, many buyer’s like to keep their out of pocket low, so that they have cash for alternatives.
These are just a few ideas of things that sellers can do to try to make their deal a better one than could otherwise be had. You could also lower the sales price, but this alone may not appeal to the largest group of prospective buyers. Of course lenders have some restrictions on how these deals can be structured, but most will allow some seller concessions.
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