If you’ve read our home tour you know that we wrote a letter to the prior owner of our current house telling her how much we loved her home and location. We offered $45,000 below asking and we told her we were offering the absolute max we could afford but we just couldn’t get the home out of our minds. She accepted our offer and told us she couldn’t knock the price down no matter what was found during the inspection. You can read the full letter on our Home Tour page.
This time around we did it nearly the same way but put a little bit more of who we were, and who are kids are, into the letter. If you have ever moved from a place that you’ve loved and called home I’m sure you can appreciate getting a letter from a potential buyer. They become more than numbers and text on an offer form and actual humans. The sellers of the home we are purchasing (in less than a week!) really liked our letter and felt like we would be a great fit for their home.
Below is the letter we wrote. The style, and content example, of it is the guide I use when encouraging real estate clients to write a letter to the owners of their dream home:
Thank you so much for considering our offer. We were at the point of brainstorming an addition when AJ found the listing for your home. We have been to two showings and have fallen more in love with your home each time we are there. We were saying this morning how simply being at your home makes us happy. You have kept it up beautifully and there are countless details we adore about it.
For the past five years we’ve been renovating our Cape on ABC Street (off of XYZ Street). AJ has taught seventh grade history at Manchester-Essex Middle School and coached the cross-country team for over a decade. Jen is a stay-at-home mom who has turned her design blog and love of refinishing furniture into a business. We attend church and our son goes to preschool in Magnolia and we have rental properties in Gloucester. In short, our life is built right around your home’s location.
As our children, Drew (4) and Elle (2), get bigger we’ve developed the real desire and need for more space. One of Jen’s dreams for our next house is a space where we can comfortably entertain. We see your home as a place that we can host dinners and parties with friends and family while still giving us space for the kids to run around and play.
We would be honored if you would accept our offer. Your home would be perfect for us and we would love to continue to raise our family here.
Thank you so much for your consideration and best wishes on your next step-
AJ and Jen
Now that we are on the other side of it as well (the buyers of our current home wrote us a letter) we can see how much it puts the seller at ease to know the buyers. Because the sellers of our “new” home have been more than gracious to us by telling other buyers to wait until our “kick-out clause” was over (read about that HERE), and because they left us a lot of furniture, we decided to follow up with a note and flowers to be given to them today when the list agent meets with them. We will never get to meet them but we wanted them to know how grateful we were for their generosity. They have been the only owners of this home and we want them to know their home is in good hands.
Have you ever written a letter to the owner of a home you wanted to purchase? Or have you had such a good experience with the sellers that you’ve followed up with a note or little gift at the closing?
We just sold our home and did indeed consider the letter written by our buyers. They seemed like the perfect caretakers for the home we built and loved and that was important to us. Also, their daughters birthday is our address number! In our part of the world, everyone is offering way over asking price, and admittedly, our buyers were also offering over asking, but they were not the highest bidders.
In turn, we wrote a letter to the sellers of the home we purchased. It’s a new build and had they put it on the market bidding would have driven the price over our budget. So, we convinced them in our letter that accepting our offer before it went on the market was smart because we were willing to let them use our home as a showcase for their budding building business.
I totally umderstand about the offering over asking price… there are so many houses that are going for over here. I love that you offered your sellers a place to showcase their budding business! 🙂
We also wrote a letter to the sellers of our home. Not only did they accept our offer, which our agent felt was not high enough due to several other bids on the property, but they invited our family to lunch at their home. It was so nice to meet them and to be personally shown all of the special touches they had added hat even the agents hadn’t known about. We absolutely love our home and I know we would have lost it if not for our letter – (turns out we were the lowest offer out of 5 bids).
What amazing sellers! They sound wonderful! I love that story, Liz!
My first husband and I wanted to by the home he grew up in, unfortunately there was a list of people that wanted that house that had made offers before we came along.
My husband was a wonderful writer, so he wrote a beautiful letter and she responded immediately an said were the only ones that wrote a letter and she and her husband felt like since the home had been the home my husband grew up in he should have the house.
Those were the happiest years for me, but my wonderful husband passed away and I sold the house, hopefully what we did to the home it will stand another 100 years, and be a home to countless other family’s.
Letters work, talk to anyone in the business of selling homes and they will tell you.
Patty, I’m so sorry about the tremendous loss of your husband. I hope too, that others will treasure what you and your husband did to the house and make as many wonderful memories as the two of you did (and as he had growing up!).
What lovely gestures to make. I wish I had a similar story to share. Instead, we offered the sellers full asking price for our new home, in cash. We were doing so from another state, for a property we had not seen firsthand. The offer was accepted. A few weeks after we moved in, we were invited to a party next door. The prior owners were guests as well. At some point in the evening, while I was talking with one of the other guests, the wife of the sellers invited herself to join us. She quickly launched into a colorful, snarky tirade directed at me. What I gathered is that our buying the house was a problem and she felt very strongly about it. Full price. Cash. Accepted. I guess I can see how that is a problem. I still shake my head every time I think about it. Some flowers really would have been nice.
Oh Ardith… how frustrating! I’m sorry! 🙁
I think that is really sweet!! I have never done that. But that is a good idea!! Y’all have fun moving and just try to enjoy yourselves!
We’ll try to enjoy ourselves… it’s supposed to be high 80s for moving day so I’m looking at it as somewhat of a hot workout. 🙂
I hope your move goes smoothly and you are all able to stay as cool as possible.Best wishes, Ardith
I’m not sure how I feel about this, especially if the buyer is asking for a lower price. It would move it from a business decision to personal & potentially add quite a bit of guilt.
I’ve only been on the buying end & it was very difficult. We were young newlyweds buying our first home from an elderly widow who did not really want to sell; we didn’t realize this until after we’d put months of time & money into the negotiations. Still, she agreed to sell but wanted to back out on the closing day – a week before Christmas, after we’d moved 1,000 miles across country. It was rotten for both of us…moving around the holidays, she leaving the home she’d built with her husband & really laying the guilt on us for wanting it. After we moved in, she dropped by unexpectedly & walk in as if she still lived there. She went around taking some things she’d left, things that were attached, upset with changes we were making. It was very hard.
Maybe a letter would have helped? We were so excited to buy our dream home (a little house on a lake) as our very first home! We’ve raised a family & are now empty nesters, still in the same house. Even then in our excitement we knew it was very hard for her so maybe a letter would have helped. As a seller though, I think it could potentially add some guilt if you get a better offer from someone else.
I wrote this whole response to you and then lost it… here we go again. 🙂 Your situation was horrible, it sounds like for both you and the seller. She completely and totally overstepped her bounds with you. I’m sorry that had to be your experience. Maybe a letter would have helped but it just sounds like she simply didn’t want to sell, and should have discovered that before accepting an offer.
Writing a letter absolutely does add a personal aspect to a business transaction. I do think there can definitely be guilt involved (I sure felt it when we said no to an offer on our home where the potential buyer wrote a letter!) but when a significantly higher or just better offer is on the table it is crazy not to take it. I told Cate, who commented below, that if the offer we rejected was a couple thousand less than the offer we accepted (instead of significantly less) I think we would have taken it because she seemed like a great fit for the house when I met her and from her letter. I think I would have had a lot easier time transitioning and leaving our home had we chosen differently and I can only imagine that is even more the case for a family / person who has been in their home for decades.
We did write a similar sweet and personal letter when we bought our home, but it got us nowhere. We did eventually buy the house after some back and forth, but the sellers were horrible. We only bought it because we had sold our condo and this became our only option that met our needs and we needed a place to live! We do love our home now (although there are so many things to improve). But the sellers were just old and difficult to deal with people. They were there when we went to look at the house and followed us around, they were there at the inspection, and on the closing day, they were still there when we went to move in claiming they thought we had agreed we would give them another day! Their daughter had to come and mediate the whole situation. Even their lawyer complained about them to us during the closing. I think if we had reasonable sellers our letter would have helped, but these people were just plain difficult. I never want to move again because the experience of finding a house and moving with small kids (and having a week in between closings when we technically had no home) was so traumatic!
Though it’s nice to know that a future homeowner will appreciate the home, I agree with Jen Y that home selling/buying is a business transaction. It’s a very bad financial decision on the part of the owner to accept thousands or tens of thousands of dollars less on their home. That’s like flushing retirement money down the toilet.
It absolutely is a business transaction, there is no doubt about it. I am suggesting a letter is appropriate in a situation to set yourself apart (in a multiple offer situation), or in a situation where the home owner was very attached to the home and is having a hard time leaving or, like in our case, it had been sitting on the market for a while without a price drop. I know we would have accepted an offer that was a few thousand dollars less on our home if we felt like the buyers would be a better fit for the home. For me it was very difficult to leave and I wanted the reassurance, however stupid it is, that someone would love and appreciate the home as much as I did.
We ended up accepting an offer that was over asking price for our home, even though I had a better feeling about the other buyer, because the offer we accepted was significantly higher. I do think, though, I would have had a much easier time leaving the home and transitioning if we had gone with the other buyer.