Printable Home Offer Checklist: What to Hand Your Agent

Most buyers walk into their agent's office with a price and a hope. The offer your agent actually writes has closer to ten moving parts, and the buyers who decide those parts in advance, instead of on the phone at 9 pm with a deadline in two hours, make calmer decisions and catch expensive mistakes early. This checklist covers every decision your agent will ask you for, in the order they will ask. Print it, fill it in, and hand it over.

What belongs on a home offer checklist

A complete offer package has four groups of decisions: proof you can pay (preapproval letter, proof of funds), the numbers (price, earnest money, down payment, cash to close), the terms (contingencies, closing date, possession, inclusions), and the questions you still need answered. The National Association of Realtors consumer guide on multiple offers is blunt about why the non-price items matter: sellers weigh financial terms, contingencies, closing timeline, and earnest money alongside the price itself. Price is one input. If you have read our walkthrough of the ten terms in every home offer, this checklist is the fill-in-the-blanks version of that guide.

Line one: proof you can pay

Get a preapproval letter, not just a prequalification, before you write anything. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau draws the line clearly: a prequalification is an estimate built mostly on numbers you told the lender, while a preapproval means the lender reviewed documentation of your credit, income, debts, and assets. Neither is a guaranteed loan, but only the preapproval carries weight with a listing agent, because it says a professional has actually checked.

Two practical notes. First, the letter amount does not have to reveal your ceiling: many lenders will issue the letter at your offer price rather than your maximum, so you keep negotiating room. Second, if your market moves fast, ask the lender how quickly they can re-issue a letter at a different amount. Same-day turnaround is common; knowing that in advance saves a scramble.

The four numbers your offer runs on

Every offer reduces to four numbers: the price, the earnest money that accompanies it, the down payment behind it, and the total cash to close. They are linked, so set them together. Here is one worked example, using illustrative figures a buyer might see; your own quotes will differ.

Take a $425,000 offer with 10 percent down and a 30-year loan at an assumed 6.5 percent rate. The down payment is $42,500, which makes the loan $382,500. Principal and interest come to about $2,418 a month. Add estimated property taxes at 1.1 percent of the price per year ($390 a month) and a $2,000-a-year insurance policy ($167 a month) and the realistic monthly payment is about $2,974 before HOA dues or utilities.

Now the cash side. Earnest money at 2 percent, which Freddie Mac cites as a typical good-faith deposit, is $8,500, paid within days of acceptance. Closing costs at an assumed 3 percent add $12,750. Total cash needed is the $42,500 down plus $12,750 in closing costs, or $55,250. But because the $8,500 earnest deposit is already sitting in escrow and gets credited back at closing, the final wire is about $46,750. If those two figures surprise you, the cash to close vs. down payment breakdown walks through every line, and the cash to close calculator will run your own numbers in under a minute.

The terms sellers actually read

Decide your contingencies and dates before you are under deadline pressure, because these are the levers a seller compares across offers. NAR's consumer guide on contract contingencies reports that the average 2024 contract carried two to three contingencies, with inspection, appraisal, and financing the most common, and home inspections appearing in about 75 percent of contracts. Each contingency needs a written timeline in the contract; a contingency without a deadline protects no one.

On the closing date: contracts typically closed in about 30 days per NAR's December 2025 Realtors Confidence Index, and about 14 percent of settlements ran late. Ask your lender what they can honestly deliver before promising a fast close. On possession: decide whether you need keys at closing or can offer the seller a short rent-back, which costs you little and can win a tie. On inclusions: appliances, window treatments, and that shed in the yard are negotiable items; list what you expect to stay so it ends up in writing rather than in a dispute.

The checklist

Fill in every blank before your agent drafts the contract. Anything left blank becomes a decision made under pressure later.

Financing proof

• Preapproval letter in hand (not prequalification), dated within 60 days
• Letter amount matched to this offer price
• Lender contact who can re-issue the letter same-day
• Proof of funds for earnest money and down payment

The numbers

• Offer price: ______
• Maximum price if countered: ______
• Earnest money (typically 1–3 percent): ______
• Down payment: ______
• Estimated total monthly payment (P&I, taxes, insurance, HOA): ______
• Estimated cash to close: ______

The terms

• Inspection contingency: full, informational, or waived, and its deadline
• Appraisal contingency: yes or no, and any gap coverage amount
• Financing contingency deadline: ______
• Closing date target: ______
• Possession: at closing, or rent-back terms
• Inclusions expected in writing: ______

Still open

• Questions for your agent: ______
• Questions for your lender: ______

Two of those blanks deserve their own homework: the earnest money line has a full 1 to 3 percent decision framework if you are unsure where in the range to land, and the maximum-price line matters more than the offer price itself, because it is the number you will be tested on in a counter.

What to hand your agent

Hand your agent the finished checklist, not a verbal summary. A one-page written brief with your price, terms, numbers, and open questions does three things: it makes the contract draft faster and more accurate, it forces every soft decision to become a firm one, and it gives you a record of what you intended before negotiation adrenaline sets in. If you would rather not build the page by hand, the offer builder walks through each of these decisions with live numbers and prints the one-page brief, including the questions worth asking, at the end.

Either way, the principle is the same: the buyers who write their decisions down before the deadline negotiate from a page, and the buyers who do not negotiate from memory.

Estimates, not appraisals · not legal or financial advice.