A house I have been counter offering on a few times back and forth has now come back with multiple bids have been place and now want the highest and best offers. The house has been on the market 14 days at almost 500k. It had an open house last weekend and one this Saturday. Is it likely there are multiple bids or is this usually more of a strategy for the selling realtor to milk more money out of you?
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You’ll never know. Always go with a no regrets offer and live with the results. Don’t stretch or chase because of FOMO or the thrill of the chase.
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This is the best answer. I’ve done some light real estate investing, and I’ve had plenty of offers rejected, and I let the place go. My mindset was to make an offer that I could live with. I never knew if there was actually other offers, but I have been out bid twice. I went with “It just wasn’t meant to be.” Kept me sane.
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Hope it works out for you either way, OP.
If it doesn’t, and you get tired of multiple offer / highest and best situations like this, then my advice would be to focus on properties that have been listed for a while, rather than jumping in on new listings with the rest of the crowd.
Making “low” offers on properties that have been listed for multiple months, not days or weeks, is what I’ve had better luck with in a tight market.
By the way, if it’s a tight market and the house has been listed for months, it’s listed too high, so a low offer isn’t really low. The worst they can do is say no, but a decent percentage of the time you’ll find yourself in a healthy negotiation at least, which is more than you can hope for when yours is one of 10 offers on a listing that just went up in the past week or so.
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14 days is nothing in anything resembling a reasonable or normal market.
As soon as your offer was received, that (even just decent) listing agent contacted the other agents who had shown the house.
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Of course it’s a strategy to milk more money out of a buyer. That’s literally why the owner of the property hired the agent…to sell it for the most money possible.
You have to make a simple decision. How much do you want to offer and under what terms? You make that offer (or you dont). And you live with that decision.
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Use an escalation clause. This way, if you get your offer accepted, evidence must be provided that there was another offer that escalated your price. Your broker/agent should know what this is and how to use it.
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An agent is not legally or ethically allowed to lie to you, but some do. The risk of going back and forth for a prolonged period of time is that you leave room for other people to submit offers so the goal really should be to get that property under contract and off the market as quickly as possible. I’d make sure that you know what your bottom line is and give it to them. No emotional overbidding out of FOMO. Highest and best is your take it or leave it offer. Just make sure you’re going to be okay if you have to leave it.