How to Get the Sellers to Pay Concessions?

Even in a slow market, when you ask the seller to pay a hefty down payment and/or closing cost concessions to help you buy the house, you may have to go full price or over to make it work. The sellers may not have enough equity or may be unwilling to go the full amount you’ve asked.
For example, if a home is priced at $157,000 and you want the sellers to pay $3,500 of your closing costs as a concession, you may have to add all or part to your sales price. The worst case would be $160,500 ($157,000_$3,500), and that opens the question of whether the home will appraise for that amount. A common response is that the seller will ask you to split the difference—up the price $1,750 and they’ll go down $1,750.
Another common situation is that the sellers don’t have any equity in the home and have no room to maneuver because the home is priced where they walk away with zero. Then you have to decide if the house is worth upping the price and if it will appraise. In these cases, you’ll need to rely on your agent’s experience and knowledge of the market to guide you.
In the end, determining what to offer is more art form than particle physics. Sellers often don’t even know what they’ll accept until a signed offer is on the table in front of them. Sometimes they’ll take offers they should counter and other times reject offers they should grab. It all comes down to the ebb and flow of the seller’s state of mind and what’s happening in their life at the time of the offer. In one particular situation, the sellers rejected an offer that was $3,500 lower than the listed price. However, the next day the sellers found out that an offer they made on a home in another state had been accepted. That changed everything. Money suddenly took a back seat to getting out of town as fast as possible. The sellers called their agent back and told him they had changed their minds and asked if he could retrieve the offer. They were now willing to sign!
In most cases, you can tip the scales in your favor by giving the sellers a bird-in-the-hand feeling with a prequalified letter and doing your homework before writing an offer. But, in the end, it’s best to stay flexible. You seldom know what motivating factors are at work or when they may change.