Does A Home Have To Be Vacant To Close A Deal?

Does A Home Have To Be Vacant To Close A Deal?

Joe: Hey, it’s Joe. This next question is from Lauren Nightingale. Lauren says, “Hi, Joe. I wanted to know, when I market to a FSBO,” For Sale By Owner, “and they call me, can the owner still live there or does the house have to be empty or vacant to move forward with the deal? Please let me know.” It’s easier to sell a property if it’s vacant, most of the time. So, at least with a lease option, because that way people can move in immediately. You can show it, you can use a lock box on the front door to show it instead of having to show up to show it every time. It makes it a lot easier to help you market that property.

Joe: If they live there, then you need to show up or you need to have somebody show up for you that can show the property. You don’t want the seller there while you’re showing it if you can avoid that. And if they’ve got stuff in the house, you can’t show it with a lockbox if they’re living there. You don’t want anything to be stolen from them. So it’s easier if they don’t live there.

Joe: Now after you sell it, obviously they’ve got to move out. And so you want to be able to coordinate that and if they don’t know when they’re going to move out, it might make sense for them to wait because you can typically sell a property on a lease option within three or four weeks as long as you have your monthly payment priced properly. If you’re too high on your monthly payment, and thirty days goes by and it’s not sold and you’re doing the marketing that I teach, using Craigslist, Zillow, sign in the yard, any of those types of things. If you do that and you’re getting 3 or 4 or 5 calls a week and nobody’s buying it, it’s because you’re too high priced on the monthly payment, 9 times out of 10. Every once in a while there’s other reasons that it happens, but most of the time it’s the monthly payment that’s causing the problem.

Joe: So that’s the way we deal with vacant versus houses that have the seller that still lives in there. If you have a tenant that lives there, or the seller has a tenant that lives there, then it becomes even more problematic and sometimes it makes sense to wait until that tenant is out and do it then. But we’ve also sold them with tenants in there. We just have to get the cooperation from the tenant. Sometimes the tenants have a year lease that they’re trying to get out of early. One of the things that we’ll say to our tenants is, if you let us market it, all we’ll do is charge you, if you’re leaving early, you have to, you know, normally, if they leave early, they have to pay the entire lease out. So if they owe us for another year, they have to pay us for a full year of rent. But we let them out of that as long as we have somebody new who’s coming in and makes that payment for them.

Joe: As long as we don’t have a gap in payment we don’t mind and we’re not going to beat them up on that monthly payment. So it makes it, gives them some incentive to let us show the property because they don’t want to have to make those extra payments while it’s vacant while we’re trying to get it sold between the time they move out and the time we find somebody new.

Joe: All right. I hope that answers the question.