What Happens After We Make the Offer?

It seems a lot of people are not real clear on the order of what happens when in the process of buying a home. That makes perfect sense, because this not something you are going to do very often, and the laws and practices of real estate in Columbia, SC have changed dramatically several times in the last few years, so we will try to give you a timeline for you to refer to.

After you sign the offer and give us your Earnest Money check, we will take your offer and present it, either to the Listing Agent, or to the Seller with the Listing Agent’s permission and accompaniment. We make a copy of the earnest money check, to go with the offer, but we do not deposit the check into our escrow account until all parties have reached an agreement.

They will then respond in some way, with acceptance, rejection or a Counter-Offer. Assuming that after some negotiating we finally come to a meeting of the minds and have a transaction that everyone has agreed to, we will call you to give you the good news that you have bought a house. (In actuality you have just started the process to buy a house, but. . .)

Within twenty four hours of the Sellers’ Acceptance, we will deposit your Earnest Money check into our Escrow account. (If this is a Contract on New Construction, the Builders usually want to have the Earnest Money in their Escrow Account. Other than that situation, it traditionally stays with us until closing.)

If there is any paperwork your Lender is still waiting on to complete the Mortgage Application Process, now is the time to gather all of that up and get it to him/her as quickly as possible.

We will immediately order the Home Inspection (unless it is New Construction in the process of being finished up, in which case we don’t inspect until everything is finished. If it hasn’t even been started yet, then the Inspector can do several inspections during the process of building.)

Once we get the Inspection Report back, you will go over it, or we will go over it with you, and decide what items you want the Seller to fix. We will prepare a written report and send that and a copy of the inspection to the Listing Agent. We don’t usually run into too many problems with getting reasonable repair requests taken care of. The Sellers’ know that if they don’t do them for you, they will have to wait on another Buyer, who will probably want the same things done, or reduce their price to reflect the repairs needed. But like everything else in real estate, this is all open to negotiation and we will be there negotiating on your behalf (and with your full knowledge and consent.) Once we have reached an agreement on what will be repaired, then we start moving forward on other inspections.

We will schedule for you a HVAC inspection, a termite inspection and any other inspections you might wish to have done. Typically the Seller will pay for the HVAC and Termite, but any others are at your expense. Depending on the company, you may need to pay them at the time of inspection or they may be willing to wait and get paid at closing. If, however, you don’t end up closing on this house for some reason, those inspection charges are still your obligation and those inspectors need to be paid for their work.

During this time period you will need to get your Homeowners Insurance ordered. The Lender and the closing attorney will both need to know who your agent is, so they can get the information they need for document preparation.

Now, of course is the time to be going down the Moving Tips checklist and doing as many things as you can ahead of time.

In the week before closing you will need to contact the utility companies servicing your new home and give them the information they need to set up your account and transfer the property to it at Closing.

If all goes well (and you may as well be warned – the closer it gets to closing, the more hectic things get. This is just the nature of the beast. There are a lot of things that cannot be done much in advance of closing, so it is not at all unusual for something to pop-up the week of closing that we have to straighten out or take care of. ) This is another time you will be glad to know that your real estate agent is an Exclusive Buyer’s Agent who is working exclusively to protect your interests.

Ideally, the Lender will send their packet of papers along with the Closing Instructions to the Attorney’s Office a day or two before Closing, although that certainly does not always happen. ( That is one of the important things we look for in a lender before we recommend them to you. Their rates may be wonderful, but if their paperwork is late or wrong and you end up not being able to close and move-in to your new home as planned, you are not going to be a happy camper!)

If the Attorney gets the loan packages, if they receive the payoffs from the Seller’s Mortgage Company, if the inspection companies submit the inspection reports and invoices and if all other paperwork as needed comes in, then the day before closing we will receive a copy of what is known as the HUD-1 statement. This is a specialized accounting sheet that shows where all the money in the transaction has come from, and where it has all gone to. We will go over this with you and answer any questions you have so that on the day of closing, when you will typically be busy, tired and nervous anyway, you won’t have to worry over the figures. This is also when we will tell you how much money you will need to bring to closing. At closing the attorney will go over those figures, again, with both you and the Seller, and answer any new or remaining questions you may have.

We try to get that to you as quickly as possible, but you may have noticed, there were several “Ifs” on which the ability to do that depends. If any of that doesn’t happen in a timely manner, then there is nothing the attorney or lender can do but try to encourage whoever is late to get their paperwork submitted. We always try to have our Closings scheduled for around 10:30 in the morning. That gives you time to go to the bank in the morning if you didn’t have the chance to the previous day, and still have most of the afternoon to move in. As always, we try to arrange everything we can to make the process of Buying a Home as painless and stress-free as possible.

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