Try Lease-to-Own for a Hard-to-Sell Home

If your Dallas home has been on the market for a while and you are having trouble selling it, you may want to consider a lease-to-own option. Lease-to-own can help sell your Dallas home during a slow housing market or when you need a little more money than the market will support. This is a good option for a few areas in Dallas Fort Worth where you are competing with new construction.

In short, here’s how a lease-to-own agreement works:

• First, a home seller agrees to lease their home to an interested home buyer for an agreed upon period of time, usually one year but can be as long as three years. At the end of the lease period, the buyer has the option to purchase the home at the preset selling price.
• A small portion of the rent payment received during the lease period is usually counted toward the down payment on the home. In order to cover that down payment, the home seller would charge a monthly premium of a few hundred dollars compared to comparable rentals (e.g., if a comparable property rents for $1,100 per month, you would set the monthly lease payment at $1,300).
• Many home owners also charge an option fee for taking the property off the market, typically 1% to 2% of the sales price. This can be applied toward the down payment as well.

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