The Real Buyer's Guide · Section Nine
Price is the part everyone thinks about and it is not the whole offer. The terms around it decide whether you win, and more importantly whether winning was good for you.
When your offer lands on a seller’s kitchen table, they and their agent are weighing at least six things at once:
| Lever | What it signals to the seller |
|---|---|
| Price | The obvious one, and rarely the only one that matters. |
| Financing type | How likely this is to actually close. See Section Three. |
| Earnest money | How serious you are, in a number they can see. |
| Contingencies | How many ways you can walk away later. |
| Closing date | Whether your timeline fits their move. |
| Concessions asked | How much of their proceeds you’re asking for back. |
I have sat at that table on the seller’s side. Two offers at the same price are almost never equal, and the one that wins is usually the one that looks most likely to close.
A deposit you make when the offer is accepted, held by a neutral third party and credited to you at closing. It is not a fee — it is your own money, sitting where the seller can see it.
A larger deposit strengthens an offer because it demonstrates commitment. It is also the money genuinely at risk if you walk away for a reason your contract doesn’t protect. That’s the entire point of it from the seller’s perspective, and it’s why the contingency section below is the part to read carefully.
A contingency is a condition that lets you cancel and keep your earnest money. Utah’s contract structures these as deadlines — dates by which you either proceed or get out.
Here is the part almost nobody tells a first-time buyer: those deadlines are blank when the contract is written, and you propose them. They are not fixed by the form and they are not set by the seller. They are terms, like price is a term, and they are negotiated the same way.
That cuts both ways, and it is worth understanding before you sign anything. Short deadlines make your offer more attractive to a seller, because they shorten the window in which you can walk away. Long deadlines protect you. Every day you add is a day of safety you buy with negotiating strength.
What I recommend, and what I would write unless you told me otherwise:
| Deadline | After acceptance | What it’s for |
|---|---|---|
| Seller’s Property Condition Disclosure | 2–3 days | The seller tells you what they know about the house, in writing |
| Due Diligence | 7–10 days | Inspections, and your window to renegotiate or walk |
| Financing & Appraisal | 21–26 days | The loan and the valuation have to hold up |
| Settlement | 28–35 days | Signing |
These are my recommendations, not rules. The real answer is however you want the contract written — a cash buyer with no inspection contingency and a seller who needs sixty days will end up somewhere completely different. Talk them through with your agent before the offer goes out, not after.
| Protection | What it lets you do | Waiving it means |
|---|---|---|
| Due diligence / inspection | Investigate the property and cancel if what you find is unacceptable. | You buy it as-is, whatever the inspection would have found. |
| Financing | Cancel if your loan doesn’t come together. | Your deposit is exposed if the loan fails. |
| Appraisal | Cancel, or renegotiate, if the home appraises below the price. | You cover the difference in cash. See below. |
In a competitive market buyers are encouraged to waive these to look stronger. Each one you give up is a real risk you are accepting, and the person encouraging you is not the person who bears it.
Your lender will not lend against a price the property doesn’t appraise for. If you agree to $500,000 and the appraisal comes back at $480,000, the lender bases the loan on the lower figure. That $20,000 does not disappear — it becomes cash you have to produce on top of your down payment, or the deal falls apart.
“Waiving the appraisal” is a promise to write a cheque.
It sounds procedural. It is a commitment to cover any shortfall out of your own pocket, and it is the single most common way first-time buyers get hurt in a competitive market.
If you are going to accept any of this risk, cap it. An appraisal gap can be limited to a specific dollar amount you have actually got — not an open-ended promise. Before you agree to anything here, know the exact number you could produce without touching your reserves. That number is in Section Two.
Before you consider paying more or giving up protections, spend the free ones:
These are the concessions I reach for first, because none of them costs you money or protection.
You can ask the seller to contribute toward your closing costs. It’s negotiated into the offer, and it is the most overlooked lever a first-time buyer has — it converts a cash problem into a price problem, which is much easier to solve.
Every loan program caps it, and the caps run off the purchase price:
| Loan | Cap | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| Conventional | 3% / 6% / 9% | Scales with your down payment — 3% under 10% down, 6% from 10% to 25%, 9% above that |
| FHA | 6% | Flat, whatever you put down |
| VA | 4%, plus closing costs | The seller can pay your ordinary closing costs with no cap at all; the 4% limit applies to extras on top |
| USDA | 6% | Flat |
The VA row is the one worth reading twice. Standard closing costs — origination, title, appraisal, ordinary discount points — sit outside the cap entirely. The 4% covers the extras: prepaid taxes and insurance, paying off your debts, a temporary rate buydown. That makes a VA buyer’s concession ask considerably more generous than the single number suggests.
Two rules that catch people. A concession can never exceed your actual closing costs — if you negotiate $10,000 and your real costs are $8,000, the extra $2,000 stays with the seller. And going over the cap doesn’t just get trimmed: the excess is treated as a reduction in the sale price, which re-runs your loan-to-value and can mean bringing more cash, not less.
Sources: Fannie Mae Selling Guide B3-4.1-02 for conventional; HUD for FHA; VA.gov for the VA structure. Verified 2026-08-13. The USDA figure is widely reported but was not confirmed against USDA’s own published guidance — treat that row as needing your lender’s confirmation.
The trade-off is honest: a seller nets less, so a concession request makes your offer weaker at the same price. Sometimes the right move is a slightly higher price with a concession attached.
You will read advice telling you to write the seller a personal letter about your family and why you love their home. Don’t.
These letters routinely reveal things like race, religion, family status and national origin — characteristics protected under fair housing law — and they invite a seller to choose a buyer on that basis, whether or not anyone intends it. That exposes the seller, it exposes both agents, and a number of brokerages will not pass them on at all.
If your offer needs a letter to win, it needed better terms. Put the effort into the parts of the offer a seller is allowed to consider.
Type into this on your phone — it saves on your own device. Bring it to the conversation and the offer takes twenty minutes instead of an evening.
Most buyers lose at least one. It is not a verdict on you and it is very often not about your price — a cash offer or a shorter timeline can beat more money.
Ask me to find out what the accepted offer looked like. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t, but when I can it is the single most useful piece of information for your next one. Losing a house and learning nothing from it is the only genuinely wasted offer.
Cecil Hawthorne, REALTOR® · Utah License #319617-SA00 · Sun Key Realty LLC · 801-870-6509 · cecil.hawthorne.realtor@gmail.com
General information about the offer process, not legal advice. Contract terms, deadlines and remedies are governed by the executed Real Estate Purchase Contract and applicable Utah law, and the state-approved form is revised periodically. Read what you sign, and consult an attorney for legal questions. Nothing here is a representation about any particular property or transaction.