Seattle Real Estate:

This is the last post in a seven part series called Four Reasons You Don’t Want to Buy a Bank Owned Home…and Three Reasons You Do.

We’ve already covered three reasons you don’t want to buy a bank owned home:
1. “Bank Owned Homes Almost Always Seem to Start Overpriced”
2. “Banks Don’t Know Anything About the House They’re Selling”
3. “Unholy Addenda Required by the Bank”

and three reasons why you might:
1. “Play Your Cards Right and You Can Buy a Great Home Cheap”
2. “An Opportunity For a Fixer Upper at a Realistic Price”
3.“Negotiating with the Bank Is Different Than Negotiating with a Homeowner”

And now for our final reason why you might not want to buy a bank owned home,

4. Negotiating with the Bank Is Different Than Negotiating with a Homeowner

Yeah, we used this one in our last post as a reason why you might want to buy a bank owned home.  Now we’re trying to pass it off as a reason why you don’t want to go after that bank owned listing.  What gives?

We’re glass-half-full kind of folks, so we thought we’d give you the good news first.  Now we feel duty-bound to let you know that there can be a downside to negotiating with a bank.  The chief downside is that it can take the patience of Job, a.k.a. a really patient guy, to make it through a bank transaction.  Really.  It takes longer than a regular sale, sometimes dramatically longer.

You’re familiar with the phrase “banker’s hours” and “banker’s holiday”, right?  So if you’re dealing with a bank, the person with whom you’re negotiating is a bank employee and has the luxury of those hours and holidays.  In other words, while you may be a home buyer 24/7, the bank representative is only a home seller from 9-5, Monday through Friday, excluding holidays. 

Just as emotional detachment can work in your favor in a negotiation, it can also work against you.  The bank doesn’t really care that:

• You plan to raise your hypothetical young family in the home just like they did. 
• The bank is not stressed about making the next payment since they stretched themselves kinda thin and already bought their next place. 
• The bank doesn’t really want to get this sale over already, so they can just move on with their life and get on the road to Poughkeepsie. 

It’s a valid and often used negotiating strategy to suss out whatever the seller wants and give it to them, in order to get a concession on another point that is important to you.  This is tougher with a bank since the house they’re selling is, to them, just numbers in a column.

Thanks for following along in our series about bank owned homes.  In the end, if you’re looking to buy a home to be your personal residence, the really important things are that it’s a home you (a) like, (b) is affordable, and (c) that it will work for your living situation.  If you’re investing in real estate, you can be a little more detached, but there are positives and negatives to weigh when you’re shopping foreclosed homes.

We’ve represented buyers in purchasing bank owned properties, so we have the experience with these kinds of transactions to help guide you through the process.  If you’re considering a search for banked owned / REO  / foreclosed properties in the Seattle real estate market, please contact us about representing you in your purchase. 

If you’re not ready to talk to a Realtor yet, please feel free to start searching Seattle real estate on our free, no-registration required home search page.  And if you like this kind of Seattle real estate information, by all means subscribe to this Seattle real estate blog!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 11:19 pm and is filed under Buyers, Kathryn Explains. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.