Closing In May, June, July, And August Deserves Advance Planning
Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, home buyers should take special care to schedule their purchase closings with three simple rules in mind:
- Don’t close on a Friday
- Don’t close in the afternoon
- Don’t close on the last day of the month
You stick with that, the rest is cream cheese.
These are three rules to live by because home purchases require a lot of man-hours and during the summertime, man-hours are in short supply.
And, if you didn’t already know, home purchases are a carefully orchestrated dance.
Check out the people involved in a typical home purchase:
The buyer(s) of the home- The seller(s) of the home
- The buyer’s real estate agent
- The seller’s real estate agent
- The buyer’s attorney
- The seller’s attorney
- The buyer’s mortgage lender
- The title company agent
- The buyer’s appraiser
And that’s before we count assistants, interns, and the other staffers involved. Closing on a home purchase is a 20-person collaboration and each is needed to make the process smooth.
This is why mid-week closings are preferable in the summer months — it’s more likely that all 20 people will be around. By the time Friday rolls around, at least one person will have started their weekend early. You can count on that.
And often, it’s more than one.
It’s also why mornings closings are preferred to afternoon ones. In the summer, people leave their offices early for all sorts of reasons — baseball games, golf outings, Caitlin’s Cooking on Fountain Square.
It’s harder to reach people when they’re oat and a boat and not tethered to their desks. That’s bad news if you need to reach somebody now.
So, let’s say you’ve scheduled a 9:00 A.M. closing on a Wednesday and all parties to your purchase are standing by, ready to assist. There’s another issue about which to be aware — title company agents are overworked.
Every day, title agents work hard to close home purchase and have to work even harder as the month goes on. This is because home buyers tend to schedule closings at month-end.
When there is more work to finish, there is less room for error.
Unfortunately, mistakes happen and title companies on their busiest days are a lot like airports on Thanksgiving — a delayed landing in the morning starts a chain reaction that delays every other landing later that day.
Therefore, to minimize the chance that of closing delays, avoid closing during peak hours, the time when everyone else is trying to close, too.
Peak title company hours are:
- Fridays
- Afternoon
- The end of the month
Purchase closings are complicated because there are loads of moving pieces and 20 different people are working to coordinate them. It won’t always be perfect, but you can make your home purchase closing easier by scheduling for an appropriate date and time.
(Image courtesy: Think Twice)
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