Love letters

[Anonymous]

Do love letters to the sellers make a difference?

Curious to hear from those who received/considered them.

[Anonymous]

They didn't matter to me, but once I get my money then I couldn't care less if the buyer turns my former home into a house of ill repute.

The letters matter to some people, especially if they're having a hard time letting go of the house. Some former neighbors sold around the same time we did. The wife kept texting me all the stuff the new owners were doing to her former home that she didn't like. She asked me what the new owners were doing to my former home and I had no idea.

[Anonymous]

I know 2 sellers who received love letters. In one case, the buyer rented the house out. In another case, the buyer sold the house in less than 6 months at a higher price to move to a different house. In other words, the letters were....not true.

[Anonymous]

Ours made the difference with original lifelong owners. We were the second highest bid with 75 over asking and no contingencies. Highest bid had no letter. Depends on temperament of the sellers, though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Do love letters to the sellers make a difference?

Curious to hear from those who received/considered them.

No didn’t work when we bought our first home. There was a home I really wanted and reminded me of my childhood home and the person selling it had built it and had a family and was moving to assisted living. But in the end she picked someone else. We had the highest bid but where we bought (NJ) realtors can shop around the offer during attorney review. So even if they accept your offer they have a few days they can take another offer. It is totally bizarre in NJ. So that’s what happened to us. It put such a bad taste in my mouth I didn’t counter as I felt even though legal it was not done in good faith. We ended up buying a better home with a better lot from people getting divorced. Didn’t write a letter and got it.

I have a relative that is a real estate attorney and she laughed and said “those never work.” Met a realtor recently who said she doesn’t advise doing them anymore for legal and discrimination reasons.

[Anonymous]

I knew someone who said it worked. He was a jerk though. No idea if he was accurate in his assessment.

It was also thought to be important in some neighborhood in LA that had its own public school district in the middle of the giant "has issues" LA school district. My friend wrote one but didn't have kids yet so felt disadvantaged in her groveling.

I know someone who wrote a love letter asking to be notified if a historic (but not costly) house went up for sale and a few years went by and they contacted her and she bought the house.

[Anonymous]

I got a beautiful letter from a buyer when I was selling my house but she was $50K under the highest offer so, no, I didnt go with her even though I wanted to.

[Anonymous]

Why would anyone take less money in return for some flowery prose?

[Anonymous]

I think they should be illegal because they encourage/enable housing discrimination. When I was a seller I asked our agent to block them for us.

[Anonymous]

Ours did. I saw Ohio State stuff at the open house so we wrote a letter being both buckeyes. We had an escalation clause so saw the first page of the other offer. We went $1000 over it, but theirs had no inspection and no financing contingency so was definitly a cleaner offer.

O-H- etc. etc.

[Anonymous]

I didn't even read the letters that came with our offers. Crunch the numbers, consider the contingencies and take the best offer. I actually hoped that our home would sell to a developer just to spite our NIMBY neighbors, but alas it went to a lovely family.

[Anonymous]

The first time we bought was a buyer's market so it wasn't necessary. This most recent time (last summer), our realtor told us up front that she would not present any love letters to us and that most people viewed them as a joke, so we didn't bother to write one when we offered (plus in this market, why bother? Just waive contingencies, that's your love letter).

[Anonymous]

We wrote one in a competitive bidding situation and got the house. No idea if the letter helped (we talked about starting and raising a family in the home just as they did - they were first owners, we are second owners), or if our bid was higher or both (probably both)

[Anonymous]

We wrote one to accompany our low offer for a house that had been on the market for a while (this was back in 2006). We had a low budget and were looking on the Hill; we found a good-sized house that had been in the same family for 80 years and needed a lot of cosmetic updates. We weren’t competing against other buyers but we were trying to get a 450k house for 400k and our letter mentioned that we were expecting our first kid, wanted to put down roots in the community, etc.

We got the house for 400k and are still here 17 years later!

[Anonymous]

We wrote one and it worked...sort of. Not in the sense that the seller accepted our offer over a better offer, but that the seller was honest about communicating where our offer stood on in comparison to others amongst a bidding war. That gave us the opportunity to get back in the game and tweak our offer when we would otherwise have just been dismissed at the initial offer stage