A few months ago I had clients from the East Coast impatiently looking for a home. They had been in a rental for close to a year and we were pretty much at the end of our rope, well I was anyway.
I had them set up on automatic MLS alerts. One morning I get an early AM email from Mrs. Buyer. She has sent me not one or two, but five emails, in shear panic that her dream house is finally on the market. I pull up the listing and it's not really in their price range. Let me restate that, it's in her price range, but not her husband's price range. As I read her frantic emails, she is scheming to be the first to see this brand new listing.
So I call the listing agent to set up an appointment and the agent has this "whatever" attitude. She doesn't work in our town, but she agrees to show us the house that morning. The house is really perfect, it's everything and more that my clients want. It's a custom home in a sea of cookie cutter houses which is hard to find even in the two million plus range. I know this is hard to believe, but it's true.
She wants to write an offer, right then, right there. I ask her, "don't you want your husband to see the house first"? I can't print her actual response but basically it was "no". She wants to write a full price offer and she wants this house no matter what. I go back to my office and pull the comps. The house is actually priced nicely. It was listed before at a ridiculously high price by a different agent and sat on the market for over a year. When it expired the out of town agent re-listed the house at a very fair price. I get this strange feeling, something is weird here; Calabasas is a cliquish place for real estate. Most of the homes in the over two million range are listed by a local agent, not some out of towner.
I pull the property profile and everything looks in order, the sellers have owned the house for about ten years and the mortgages aren't new and there is no pre-foreclosure activity. I always do a little research on the other agent before I write an offer and this one has no website, no blog, no google, no nothing. There was just one mention about her on the broker's website. I then check the DRE website and see that the agent is brand new. She had just received her license. So now that I know who I'm dealing with I give her a call to say that I'm writing an offer and try to find out any tidbit of information.
She is a cold fish; she doesn't give me any clues to anything. In our little town, where most of the agents know each other, this initial phone call is critical. So I write the offer not knowing much more than what is on the listing and send it off for signatures. I figure, it's close to a full price offer, the house has been on the market only a few hours, the market had slowed down, it would be a done deal by the end of the day.
No such luck. I don't hear anything from the other agent so I call to follow up. She did receive the offer but says she has one other offer in her hand and has another on the way. She also tells me that she will be meeting with her seller's to go over the offers the next day. How bizarre is this? This is not a seller's market, and this house is priced nicely, not under priced by any stretch. My buyer has already called me several times to find out if I've heard anything. I call her and tell her what I do know. She is beyond freaking out, "I don't care what we have to do, I want this house!" I get it, I really do, but for now we just have to wait for the counter offer.
The next day, I hear nothing from the seller's agent, so I call her again. I ask her when I can expect a counter offer. And she replies, "Oh, you won't be getting a counter offer, we just want your best and final offer by 5:00 PM tomorrow". "Huh?" Now I don't know if this agent is so new that she doesn't have a clue what she is doing or if her broker who is not new, is giving her some brilliant advice that I've never heard of in my 25 years in real estate. Basically she's letting all the offers expire so she has nothing and she's asking everyone to write entirely new offers. Even when our market was a mega sellers market, I never saw this tactic. It's risky, especially in this price range when you're dealing with huge egos. The house is nice, and it's priced nice, but it's not super incredible or priced below market.
So I think stealthy now, what can I do to find out what the heck is really going on. Who are these people and what is this agent up to? I grab the expired listing and call the first listing agent who I know slightly. After exchanging niceties, I ask her what ever happened with her listing on B Street. She explains that the seller's weren't all that motivated to move last year so they didn't budge on the high listing price. When their niece finally got her Real Estate license, they decided to list with her even though she wasn't from the area. After some more investigative questioning, I find out that the time factor and repair contingency are the big issue for the sellers. The house has some deferred maintenance and the seller's would rather give a monetary adjustment than arrange for repairs. Apparently they are in the middle of some sort of "situation" and now is the time to move.
With these tiny morsels of information, I go back to my buyers and we write an offer that was not only our best and final, but ultimately gets this house. Here is what we wrote: We did increase our offer price, but in the whole scheme of things, it wasn't huge. But what we did do is write that the house would be purchased "as is". Our plans were to have a professional property inspection, and the opportunity to cancel the transaction should something major turn up, but we would ask for no repairs. We also asked for a short escrow period and gave the seller's three extra days after closing to move. In addition, we sent proof of funds to close, the mortgage pre-qualification letter and two back up methods of funding the loan so that the sellers knew the transaction was solid and we were serious buyers.
After this transaction finally closed and I had formed some sort of relationship with this out of town agent, I asked her what the story was regarding those initial negotiations. As it turned out, her non-response and no counter offer did scare away one of the "would be" buyers. So that left only two best and final offers. They were the same offer price, but because we had not asked for repairs and had given them the extra three days, plus the back up funding options, ours was the accepted offer.
The whole point of this very long winded post is there is more than one way to skin a cat. Just because the listing agent doesn't give you information, there are always other ways to figure out what is going on. Sometimes you have to dig deep to figure out what the seller motivation is and sometimes that includes talking to neighbors or previous listing agents.
Even though our market has changed to more of a buyer's market, it still pays to think out of the box when you're looking for solutions to your every day transactions. Our product is still service, not the house. If you plan on selling real estate for the long haul, this type of thinking will always get you repeat clients and referrals.
My clients have since moved into their dream house. I was invited to their Fourth of July BBQ and it was so nice to see them settled in and enjoying their new home. They introduced me to their friends as the miracle worker agent and it felt good.
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