When the housing market gets competitive, potential buyers will sometimes try to think of other ways to get the homes that they want. One tactic that people will sometimes consider is writing a letter to a home’s owner about how much they love that home, what it would mean for them and why they hope their offer is the one that gets accepted.
Basically, this buyer is just trying to plead their case by making themself sound relatable and like an attractive option, even if the money is the same. They may write about how the neighborhood will be great for their children, for example, or how they are excited for the kids to start at their new schools. They may talk about how the home will be beneficial to their family life or how they’ve always been looking for a dream home that looks exactly like this one and they’ve never found it before.
This may seem like a good idea because you hope you can spark some goodwill in the seller and get them to accept your offer, but it can actually be very problematic and many experts say you should not do it.
What kind of issues can it cause?
The big problem with writing a love letter to the house is that it can create a situation in which discrimination accidentally occurs.
For example, imagine a seller gets two love letters from two different couples. One couple is African-American and the other couple is white. If the seller is offered the exact same terms from both and decides to sell the house to the white couple, is it just because they were biased against the other couple on racial grounds? Perhaps it had nothing to do with that, but questions will certainly be raised.
Essentially, a love letter about a house can give away too many personal details about things like your race, your religion, your age, your family situation and much more. It can be unfair when sellers are using these details to decide who should get to buy the house, so it is better if they simply do not know and they consider the financial terms of each offer purely on their own merit.
Buying a house can be more complicated than you may have assumed, so be sure you know what legal steps to take.