By Mike Tamulevich, COO, Marketplace Homes
Most of what we do for our builder partners comes down to one word: certainty. Guaranteed Sale. Guaranteed Buyout. Rental Guarantee. GLA. Every one of those programs exists for the same reason, so a builder can close a home, free up a lot, or move inventory without waiting on someone else’s transaction to fall into place first. We built our entire builder side of the business around removing the one thing that slows a deal down the most: the contingency.
Then I get to the other side of the transaction, representing a home for sale, and I run straight into the thing we spent so much energy engineering away. A buyer falls in love with the home, but they need to sell their own house first. So they write us a contingent offer, and everything that made the builder side clean gets messy again.
What Actually Happens
Once a home goes under a contingent contract, it usually still has to show as active or contingent, continue to show, depending on the market. On paper that sounds like the best of both worlds, we are technically under contract and still getting looks. In practice, it is the worst of both worlds. Buyers and agents scroll past anything that already shows as under contract, even with a contingency attached, because nobody wants to fall in love with a house they might not be able to get. So the showings slow down right when we need them most.
Then the clock runs out on the buyer’s own sale. If their home does not sell inside the option period, we are back to square one, except we are not really at square one. We are behind it. We have lost weeks of the listing’s freshest market window, the algorithm and the buyer pool have both moved on, and we are relaunching a home that already has a little bit of staleness attached to it.
The Same Problem, Facing the Other Way
Here is what strikes me every time it happens. This is the exact same certainty problem we already solved for builders, just pointed in the other direction. On the builder side, we did not wait around hoping a resale would close on time. We stepped in and became the guarantee ourselves. On the buyer side, we are back to hoping someone else’s house sells on schedule.
It makes me wish we got to bring buyers into the same kind of relationship we already have with builders. Not just representing the home they want to buy, but standing behind their move the way we stand behind a builder’s inventory. A real bridge, or a trade in style program, something more solid than crossing our fingers that their current home finds a buyer in time.
Why It Matters to Me
I do not think this is a small operational annoyance. I think it points at a real gap between how we serve builders and how we serve the people actually buying the homes we sell. We have already proven that removing the contingency works, that it protects momentum, and that it lets people move forward with confidence instead of waiting on a chain of unrelated transactions. I would love for more buyers to get to feel that same certainty.
If anything, running into this on the buyer side makes me more motivated to keep building on the builder side, not less. Every time I watch how much smoother a deal moves once we take the guesswork out, it reminds me why we keep refining Guaranteed Sale, Guaranteed Buyout, and GLA in the first place. The friction I see on the buyer side is proof the model works. It just pushes me to keep looking for the next place to apply it.
Transactions are the result. Relationships are the reason. If we can find a way to extend the same certainty we give builders to the families buying these homes, that is a problem worth solving.