A couple of years ago I listed a property in North York. It had been in the same family for more than 50 years and the house sat on a premium lot with a 40 foot frontage. The property was an ideal opportunity for a builder. We listed it for $1,199,000 on a Friday and set a date to review offers the next Tuesday. To my surprise, by the time Tuesday rolled around 15 agents had registered offers. On that same morning, I got a call from a gentleman who said he wanted to buy the house, but would only deal with me because I was the listing agent. I told him to meet me at my office at 10AM and that offers were going to be presented at 11:30AM. When the potential buyer showed up at my office, he told me he hadn't even seen the inside of the house, but had driven by it. He gave me a bank draft for $100,000 as a deposit and said, "I want this house and I'll pay more than anyone else. You present my offer after you've looked at all of the other offers, and tell me what the highest offer is. I'll pay more."
We sold a bungalow back in April with a completion/closing date scheduled for mid July. It seemed like a straightforward transaction. We represented the Seller, who lived out of town and had rented the house to two separate tenants - one who occupied the main floor of the bungalow and the other who lived in the basement. In the Agreement of Purchase and Sale, our client promised the buyer vacant possession of the entire premises, meaning that both tenants would have to move out and find new places to live before the deal would close. The main floor tenant found a new home very quickly; however, as the closing approached we discovered that the basement tenant had not found a place to move to and to top it off, hadn't even started looking.
I recently received a call from an agent on one of my listings. On the listing I stated that the seller would consider holding a mortgage for the new buyer. The agent said to me, "You mentioned on the listing that your seller will hold a mortgage. Can you tell me what that means?" I immediately knew that the agent I was speaking to was fairly new...
About six weeks ago I encountered something I hadn't experienced while trading real estate for some time. It was for a bungalow in the Cliffside Village area of Scarborough. We went in with an offer significantly under the asking price, and with a condition on a home inspection. I was expecting the Sellers to either sign back the offer closer to the asking price, and/or to remove the condition. I was completely surprised when
I listed a detached backsplit home in the Yonge and Sheppard Avenue area not so long ago. It was built in the 1950s and had been in the same family for more than 60 years. We received 16 offers for the home and went through presentation process at my office in the Beaches. Midway through the presentations, one of the agents who had already shown us his offer asked to speak to me. "Mr. Brown, can you please let me know if you are going to accept my client's offer? He is here with me now but has to get on a plane back to China within the next two hours." I told him his offer was lower than several we had already received and sent him away...