One of the largest challenges of running your own real estate business is maintaining steady cash flow. You may have multiple contracts pending and ready to close within the next month, but that means nothing when you have expenses and overhead that need to be taken care of immediately.
Maintaining relationships with vendors, as well as with clients, is at the heart of your business. Here at Express Cash Flow, we are dedicated to helping professional real estate agents and brokers improve their day to day cash flow and operating budgets. Similar to the way banks offer loans based on accounts receivable, commission advance companies like Express Cash Flow provide early payment on your pending commissions. You get up to 75% of your commission before closing so you can pay your service providers on time. Once you receive your commission on a real estate sale, Express Cash Flow receives the amount of the advance, plus their fee, back through closing.
Deals can fall through, however. Here are three reasons real estate deals sometimes breakdown:
Appraisals
Every lender and loan requires that the property in a pending real estate transaction be appraised. This protects the buyer – they don’t want to end up upside down in a new real estate investment – and ultimately, protects the lender, too. Real estate appraisals are typically based on recent sales. If sales haven’t caught up to a shifting market on the rise, this can happen. Sometimes, these deals can be saved through negotiations, but if the difference between the appraised value and the sale value is too great, these deals can fall through.
Property Condition
With the help of savvy buyers’ agents, most prospective home purchasers will request an inspection. An inspector will test and examine all of a home’s systems, including electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and even the roof. These deals may fall through if the seller doesn’t have the finances to cover the work and can’t afford to take a hit on the sales price. In foreclosed homes, banks are often unwilling to finance any repairs, meanwhile, the lending bank is unwilling to make a loan in the home’s current condition.
Buyer Motivation
Looking at homes to buy is fun. Dealing with all the requisite paperwork and effort to close a deal isn’t. If a buyer isn’t very motivated, even the smallest hiccup – and there will be hiccups – may lead them to believe it’s easier to walk away from a real estate transaction.
Any of these factors, as well as many others, can delay the all-important close of escrow. Utilizing a commission advance can allow agents to breathe a little easier during their escrow, knowing that the money is already in their pocket.
Express Cash Flow also understands that not every escrow closes. As a real estate professional, we trust that you are going to close another escrow in the near future, and may even have other escrows going concurrently with the escrow associated with the advance. That’s an easy enough solution we simply transfer your advance to another escrow, and there is no out of pocket payment for you.