The idea of making something happen in this market or any other is an idea that sellers can get their teeth on and arms around. Sellers often expect their listing agent to be serious and network their home to everyone they know and people they don't. But all too often there has been interest in the home, the interested party just never came forth with an offer and the listing agent and seller excepted that that buyer just did not like the home well enough to make an offer.
We do something different that has started creating quite a stir at our real estate company and the feedback from our sellers, even if the offer does not work, is thank you for trying. I am grateful that you are my agent and at least you are making something happen.
So we call this a reverse offer. We made up the components of what we do exactly and sometimes we change what we do to make the components fit the situation but we follow a couple rules all the time.
In the situation when a buyer has seen a house two times, we call the agent and ask if we are on the short list. When they say yes, you are on the short list but they don't say that we are the top house, we ask what the objection is in the house. One situation was that there was not heating and air in the basement. We say okay and then ask; "Do you mind if we give your buyers and offer?"
This throws the agent off quite a bit, but then they say okay after thinking about it and asking us over and over if it is legal to do that. I promise you, that is exactly what happens and it really makes you wonder why agents are so much in-the-box that they would think that something out-of-the-box would be illegal.
Anyway, we go to work now and call our seller and get the offer together based on our desire to overcome the objection and then we present the offer to the buyer via the agent.
Whereas the Reverse Offer does not work 100% of the time, we are working them to close about the same amount of time as when we get the offer from the buyer to the seller. Again, the most important thing is that we are making something happen instead of sitting on our hands, and frankly that is what my sellers expect from me.
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Yeah, it's funny when these things come up. I have made reverse offers when I thought the objections were something we could over come. Sometimes the agent and/or buyer is not being honest about the true nature of the objection and then the counter can never work.
I also had a buyer that was difficult to get off the fence recently. He absolutely wanted to buy, but he was absolutely stuck in paralysis by analysis. I told the listing agent of the two homes that he was trying to chose between to make a reverse offer to us. One said "we have a list price, isn't that good enough" and the other said, "what?" . Neither resulted in a communication from the seller to the buyer and the buyer ultimately settled on a third home that wasn't even in the picture when we talked to #1 and #2!