When should a seller consider accepting a bully offer?
I am of the opinion that a seller is almost always going to do better if they avoid looking at bully offers, and wait until their scheduled offer night instead.
Every now and then though, a seller finds themselves in a situation where a bully offer is just too damn good to pass up!
Sometimes the price is so phenomenally above what they were expecting to get, that it's just not worth the risk of waiting and ending up with a lower price on offer night.
Sometimes the sellers are seriously stressed out by the entire process of having their home on the market, and the prospect of having it all over-and-done with is a no brainer.
And then there are times where it's actually looking like the home is not going to get the offers that the sellers want/expect on offer night. Case in point...
Earlier this year I had a listing in the west end of the city.
We spent a couple of weeks prepping the property to go on the market, and we decided that the best strategy would be to review offers on a specific date (the following Tuesday after the property initially hit the market).
I actually felt that we were pricing the home at the very top range of what it might be worth, and that we shouldn't necessarily expect to get multiple offers on offer-night. My clients appreciated where I was coming from, but we still felt that a hold-back on offers was the right strategy since comparable homes rarely come up for sale in the area.
Five days into the listing, I received a call from a buyer's agent, saying that her clients wanted to submit a bully offer. My clients were happy to look at it.
Once the offer was registered with my office, I did my duty and reached out to every single agent who had shown the property. And you know what? None of them had clients who were interested in submitting an offer. Not one.
None of them wanted to compete with a bully offer, and in fact, none of them were planning to submit anything on the scheduled offer night either!
It was quickly becoming apparent that this bully offer was probably the only offer we were going to see.
I told my sellers that they were likely going to do much better if we worked with the bully offer that night, as the buyers would be acting under the perceived threat of having to compete with other buyers on offer-night.
We ended up selling the property that night, with only the one offer, for above the list price.
Needless to say, my clients were very happy. The buyers were happy too, as they the secured the home they wanted (who knows if another buyer might've come out of the woodwork on the scheduled offer night and out-bid them?).
Bully offers are a tricky beast, and it's sometimes a tough call on whether or not to to work with them. Sometimes though, it just makes sense to take the money and run!
If you're thinking of selling your home, and you want an agent who knows when you should or shouldn't consider accepting a bully offer, feel free to contact us for more info.