My clients teach me a lot about this business, no matter how experienced in home buying they may be. Today I had a first time home buyer call me. I learned something new about the market in the course of my discussion with her. She contacted me after she’d been looking into several “rent-to-own” opportunities, probably structured as a lease with an option to buy. She called me after using my web site to double check the price on one of these opportunities, which seemed very high to her.

In the course of the conversation, it struck me that a year or two ago I was telling buyers that lease with an option is not something they’re likely to be able to negotiate. Now it seems that sellers may be hoping to use the “lease with an option” in the hope of getting the price that they’ll have a hard time getting if they compete with homes being offered only with conventional financing.

So today a newcomer to the home buying process was able to get me to articulate yet another facet of the classic real estate “ying / yang” of price and terms. As a colleague of mine commented the other day about real esate, what makes it interesting is that there’s always more to learn.

So, if you can’t get your price, change your terms. If you can’t sell when you offer better terms, you’d better lower your price, too!

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