THE 3 BIGGEST REASONS YOU CAN'T SELL YOUR HOME

So-called “sale fails” are on the rise.

Deals to sell homes are falling through at a faster rate than they were a year ago, according to a report released Wednesday by real-estate site Trulia. which found that Indeed, “on an annual basis, the failure rate has nearly doubled to 3.9% in 2016, up from 2.1% in 2015,” the report revealed. The real estate site looked at all listings that were pulled for the first two months of each quarter from the fourth quarter of 2014 through the fourth quarter of 2016.

Home sale deals fail for three main reasons, said Felipe Chacon, a housing data analyst for Trulia:
1) A buyer can’t get financing.

2) The inspection turns up something bad.

3) The appraisal doesn’t match up to the sale price.

More first-time buyers — many of them young and with lower incomes — are attempting to buy a starter home now. First-time homebuyers made up 35% of sales in 2016 up from 32% in 2015, the National Association of Realtors found. And members of this group is more likely to have trouble getting financing, as they are typically not familiar with the process and may not bring as long of a credit history or as much equity to the table, says Chacon.

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Plus, many baby boomers are putting their homes on the market as they downsize and prepare for retirement. These homes tend to be older and thus are more likely to have issues that an inspector will catch, the study concluded. Finally, with home prices climbing steadily, many sellers ask high sums — and many buyers agree to those sums. The problem is that an appraiser might not, and the sale fails.

Of course, most of the time, when a buyer and seller make a deal, it does go through. Sale fails represent just 4.3% of all listed properties. And certain kinds of homes (high-end newer homes, for example) are far less likely to end up in a failed deal than others. Furthermore, buyers whose sales do go through are more likely than in the past to be able to pay their mortgage, thanks to stricter lending guidelines since the Great Recession.