Once you're preapproved for a loan and you've survived the rigors of house hunting, the time will come when you find a house that you'd like to call home. But first, you'll need to make an offer. The offer is the first step in the negotiation process. A good basic offer includes the price you're willing to pay for the house, your financing terms, and contingencies, such as specifying what will happen if negative findings come up during the inspection.
      Purchase contracts vary from state to state. Regardless of where you live, if you're making an offer, you want it to be carefully worded and well thought out.
      In the book "Home Buying for Dummies (Hungry Minds Inc., 2001)," authors Eric Tyson and Ray Brown say there are three key elements to a good offer.
      Begin, they say, with a realistic offering price. Your REALTOR® will help you with this, but basically you want to come up with a price based on similar houses sold in the neighborhood in the past six months. You'll also want to keep the local conditions in mind. In other words, if houses are selling quickly and many houses are receiving multiple

     If you are being transferred, enlarging your family, or preparing to make an offer on another home, you are a motivated seller - ready to make the best deal to sell your home quickly. You and your REALTOR® can take numerous and appropriate actions to help you meet your goals.
      But many sellers aren't in a hurry to sell. They may want to test the market to see how high prices will go, or they might want to try a different lifestyle, but are undecided as to when and where they want to move. Realtors call these sellers unmotivated, because without firm plans, they can give the agent very little to do to move the transaction forward. The unmotivated seller can't sign a listing contract, and therefore the agent can't market the home, tell other agents about the home, or show the home to buyers.
      Yet it is often at this stage of indecision that sellers will most often contact an agent for help. They let the agent know that they are "thinking of selling" and ask the agent to create a marketing plan for them, including the gathering of comparable data of homes in the neighborhood. They use this information to help them decide whether the timing is right to sell, how much they could possibly net from their home, and to help them decide what range home they would like to purchase when they are ready to move. Then the sellers tell the agent, who has put in hours of work to get this information, that they will let