Tips to Help Work with Low Ball Offers
Tips on How to Deal with Low Ball Offers on Your Home.
You’ve worked hard to get your home ready to sell, studied the market and listed at a price you think is fair. Finally, you get an offer and it’s so low you think it must be a bad joke! You really want to tell them to go jump in the lake, but maybe not so fast.
Buyers will be Buyers and Negotiation is how selling a home works; low offers are better than no offers. The fact that someone wants to buy your home is a good thing.
4 Tips to Help you work with a low ball offer
1.) Control your emotions – Selling a home can be surprisingly emotional. You’ve spent years in your home, you’ve probably done a ton of work making your home special and you have a lot of great memories. All this can make the house feel like a treasure instead of a piece of real estate. But, when you’re selling it’s time to leave your emotional attachments at the door. You’re engaging in a business transaction and it’s a business negotiation. It doesn’t matter where the buyer starts it’s where they end up and the first person to lose their cool loses; so take a step back and let reason prevail.
2.) Assess the situation with your agent – How long have you been on the market? How many showings have you had? How many offers have you had? What is the current market value, has the market moved away from you since you went on the market? Look at the comps, Is this low ball offer fairly accurate with market comps? Now is the time to take a hard look at your position in the market and ask yourself if you’re being realistic?
3.) You are in Control – You may have found your next dream home and would like to move quickly, but don’t have to accept any offer you don’t want to. We said it before, it’s good news that you have an offer, you just need to figure out how to make it work if it’s possible.
4.) Make a Counter Offer – You don’t know, the Buyer may not be listening to their agent or they could be relying on Zillow or other online values. While most Real Estate agents understand the chances of Zillow pegging a real estate value accurately is very slim, buyers do not. Instead, they rely on data that is completely out in left field.
When you are confident you’ve priced your home correctly, you can hold the line close to your asking price. Typically, sellers will leave a cushion between the list price and where they expect it to sell. For the same reason the buyer is now bidding low because they too are expecting to meet somewhere in the middle. When you really want or need to sell meeting in the middle makes everyone feel like a winner.
Countering over asking price or not responding at all can be viewed as confrontational. It can make you feel better in the short term but they don’t work towards accomplishing the desired goal of selling your home.
The middle is usually what buyers are looking for, but if you counter in the middle they will likely counter once again below what was the middle. If, in your initial counter, you find the middle and add a little cushion from there the buyer can comfortably counter in the middle and you’ll be more likely to make the deal. They may even feel like a little above the middle works for them.
If after you’ve countered with something at least minimal and the buyer doesn’t come up substantially, you now know you’re wasting your time and can move on.
Having the right team on your side with the knowledge and experience it takes to bring a winning deal together will be critical when selling your home for top dollar. Call Cathi and Ben Walter today to find out how their winning strategies will get your home sold quickly for top dollar. 760.218.5752
