How I Lost 20 Grand with the Stroke of a Pen

Remember the probate property I told you about a while back that not only had to have the laterals replaced (which ran UNDER the foundation of the ENTIRE HOUSE) but also got broken into and robbed?

I finally got around to putting it up for sale and received over 27 offers in less than a week.

Well over half of those offers were ABOVE the asking price. Great news for me? Not exactly..
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I had to use my famous Probate Fox intuition to try to figure out which, if any, of these offers would actually appraise for the offered price.

This ain’t my first rodeo so I knew my counteroffer would be for the buyer to come into escrow with cash to cover the difference between the offered price and appraised value.

The results of my hard-nosed bargaining? I listed the house at 30k above what I originally expected to get for the house when I first bought it AND the winner’s offer was an additional 30k ABOVE my asking price!
Sounds like great news, right? On paper, it looks like I made an extra 60k

So how did I lose 20 grand?

Well within 10 days of accepting the winning offer, multiple properties around my flip sold north of 20k HIGHER than the offer I accepted for my property.

I did have a higher priced offer that was $40k above everyone else’s that I declined during the bidding war. Why did I decline more money? I didn’t think it was in the realm of possibility that the appraisal would come in that high and the buyer only had an extra 12k in cash.

Learn from my mistake when you are reviewing your buyer’s offers.

I should have accepted the higher offer and adjusted it after the appraisal came in (the appraisal came in at 25k above the contract price).

I’m not much of a gambling man which is why I accepted the sure offer.

In the end, I still won – an extra 60 grand in my pocket is nothing to sneeze at, but it irks me just a bit that if I had played my cards differently, I would have made an extra 20k.

Committed to your success,
Ernie “Learn From My Mistakes” Vargas | The Probate Fox