With the housing market as competitive as it is, home buyers are willing to tolerate more risk as they search for a new home, even if it means paying well above asking price or relenting on their wish lists.
Repair Pricer, a firm that provides an AI-powered home inspection cost calculator, surveyed more than 3,000 American adults to gauge their willingness to take risks during the homebuying process.
Forty percent of respondents said they’re willing to pay $20,000 over the asking price for their dream home. Also, an alarming finding: Nearly 30% say they’d be OK with bribing someone to get their dream home, the survey shows.
Home buyers are eager to get into homeownership any way they can. Eighty percent of respondents say they’re willing to purchase a fixer-upper, and 42% would purchase a home that didn’t meet their requirements just to be a homeowner.
Researchers considered the following homebuying behaviors among the riskiest:
- Buying a home without seeing it in person
- Waiving inspections
- Skipping an appraisal
- Paying significantly above the asking price
Home buyers in certain states said they would tolerate some of these behaviors more than others. For example, about 12% of home buyers in Iowa, Oklahoma, and Maryland were willing to forgo an appraisal on a home. About 11% of home shoppers in Colorado said they’d buy a house without seeing it first.
Most home buyers, however, were not willing to skip a home inspection. Only 3% of respondents said they’d be willing to skip that step.
“Home buyers are willing to jump through a number of flaming hoops and do outlandish things in order to snag their dream home—but skipping an inspection is not one of them,” researchers said.
Overall, the states with the buyers who are most willing to waive certain contract conditions to have a winning offer are Maryland, Washington, and Utah, the study found.
