Making an offer

Within 10 days of meeting with the construction loan officer, we had everything together to get ready to make an offer. We crunched the numbers and with the help of Thane, we were able to get an offer together.

The land had been for sale for over a year, so we were ready for a little negotiation.

We offered them about 85% of their current price expecting them to counter. They did with an offer of about 97%. We knew this meant they didn't have a lot of room to work, so we countered with about 90%. They again countered with about 96%. We finally made our best offer, just under 95%, but they declined. However, before our Realtor could contact us, to let us know they had declined, they called back and made one last ditch effort to make it work - an offer of just over 95%. Being only a couple hundred dollars different from our last offer, we accepted and signed the the papers.

We ended up getting the land for about 91% of the original listing value (they had dropped the listing price a couple of times), so we felt like we got a good deal. We agreed to a September 30 closing date and then handed things over to the title company and our construction loan officer, who set us up with a land loan until we could get a construction loan going.