What a Buyer Should Do in the 48 Hours After a Claremont Open House

Buyers treat the open house as the event and the days afterwards as waiting. It is the wrong way round. The house was two hours of impressions; the forty-eight hours after it are when those impressions either turn into a decision or evaporate into a vague sense that it was nice.

This is the buyer-side sequence. It deepens the open house guide, and assumes you toured the home properly using the touring guide.

Hour one: write it down before you drive away

Memory for houses decays fast and it decays selectively, keeping the emotional impression and dropping the specifics. Whatever you write in the car is what you will actually have on Tuesday.

Four lines is enough. The best thing about it. The worst thing about it. The thing that would cost money. A score you are not allowed to revise later. That last constraint matters more than it sounds, because your Sunday score is honest and your Wednesday score has been quietly negotiated by the fact that you have not seen anything better since.

Day one: separate the house from the staging

Sit with the question of what actually produced the good feeling. Light, layout, sightlines, ceiling height, the connection to the garden, the quiet of the street: those come with the house. Furniture, art, scent, music, a warm afternoon and a well-timed cup of coffee do not. Both are real, but only one of them is included in the purchase price.

Then do the same in reverse. Was there something you disliked that is genuinely a defect, or was it a wall colour and someone else's sofa? Buyers routinely rule out good homes over things that cost a weekend to change and fall in love with weaker ones over things that leave in a van.

Day one: the questions that are better asked afterwards

Almost everything worth knowing is easier to get on Monday than in a hallway with five groups waiting behind you. If you have an agent, this is their call to make on your behalf, and it lands very differently agent to agent than it does from a name on a clipboard.

The useful set: how long the home has been on the market and whether it has been listed before under a different agent; whether the price has moved; whether there are offers, and whether the seller has set a review date; what the seller's preferred timing looks like, because a seller who needs a long escrow and a seller who needs to be out quickly want different offers; what stays and what goes; and whether any reports, disclosures or an inspection are already available for review.

That last one deserves emphasis. Pre-existing reports save you time and they tell you something about the seller before you have spent anything, including how the property has been prepared and how transparent the listing side intends to be.

Day one: the checks you can run from a laptop

You saw the house for perhaps twenty minutes at one time of day. There is a lot you can establish before you commit to anything, and none of it requires access.

Look at what the property is: the recorded lot, the permitted square footage, whether obvious additions or converted spaces appear in the permit record. A converted garage or an unpermitted room is not automatically a problem, but it is a very different conversation if it surfaces in escrow rather than now, and the city is the place to ask.

Then look at what surrounds it. Drive the street at a completely different hour, ideally on a weekday during commute time and again after dark. Sunday afternoon is a house at its most flattering. Traffic patterns, street parking pressure, noise, and how a foothill lot feels once the light has gone off the mountains are all things a two o'clock visit conceals.

The red flags article covers what to look for at the house itself; this is the layer around it.

Day two: decide honestly whether you are writing

By the second day one of three things is true, and buyers get into trouble by refusing to name which.

You are OUT. Say so, tell your agent why in one sentence, and let the reason sharpen the search. A rejection you can articulate is worth more than three houses you drifted past.

You are WATCHING. That is a legitimate position, particularly on a home you suspect is priced ahead of itself. Set the condition that would change your mind, out loud, and let it sit. Watching without a stated condition is just hoping.

You are IN, in which case stop touring and start preparing. That means your financing is current rather than theoretical, your agent has asked the questions above, and you have decided what your terms actually are before anyone tells you what somebody else offered.

Two things not to do

Do not go back for a second public open as your next step. Another Sunday in a crowd tells you almost nothing new. A private second showing at a different hour, with your own agent and time to look at the panel, the heater, the roofline and the drainage, is worth five more open houses.

And do not write a letter about your family. Buyers are often told a personal letter helps. It is a fair housing hazard: those letters routinely disclose characteristics that must not influence a seller's decision, and a seller who reads one has a much harder time showing the choice was made on terms. Well-run listings do not pass them on. Put your effort into price, terms, financing and timing, which are the things a seller can lawfully weigh.

A note on what the other side is doing

Follow-up from a listing agent within a day or two is normal and it is not pressure. They are routing feedback to their seller and finding out which visitors were real. Being straightforward about where you stand costs you nothing and gets you better information back.

Be aware, too, that your own conversation at the property may not have been private. Most listed homes have cameras; sellers are expected to disclose video and disarm interior audio, because California is a two-party consent state for confidential communications, but the candid pricing discussion still belongs on the pavement rather than in the kitchen.

Forty-eight hours is enough time to convert an impression into a position, and it is short enough that the house is still real to you. Use it.

Anthony Grynchal has been licensed in California since November 2009. This is general information rather than legal or financial advice.