After visiting 4 houses we decided on making an offer on the fourth one: it’s well-located, has a large front yard (and no backyard!), and two levels, the second of which has a very weird layout.

Apparently the no-backyard thing is a deal breaker for most people, but it wasn’t for us because the front yard is a pretty good size. The second odd thing is the layout; this may have put a lot of people off, but our realtor suggested it could easily be remodelled into something more traditional and fitting to our needs.

So after coming home and sleeping on it, we decided we could renovate the space before moving in, and that would make the house good for our needs. So then you call your agent and tell them you want to make an offer to purchase the house.

The offer is called “promise to purchase” in Québec, and it’s a very standard format, but it made a lot of sense for the agent to help us with that. She asked for a beginning price we’d be willing to offer, and offered advice on whether to modify this (she actually suggested we go lower than our initial idea, so we went with her advice).  She’ll also help decide which conditions to add to the offer. In our case, it was conditional to getting the financing, and on having an inspection performed on the property.

The seller can either reject your offer, accept it as-is, or send you a counter-offer. In our case we got a counter-offer, with a higher price (but still below what I’d wanted to offer in the first place – this validated our agent’s criteria about the initial offer). Since this was well within what we were expecting, we accepted the counteroffer. This starts the clock ticking to fulfil the conditions, the main ones being financing and the inspection. Talk to your agent and ensure you allow enough time for all this to happen.