What happens when you’re selling your home and you get a lowball offer? This is a question and a situation we deal with frequently.
First, I would say congratulations on getting an offer on your home. It may be a lowball offer, but we encourage people to respond well and be gracious that it came in. There are a lot of properties sitting on the market with no offers at all. What we normally see with these lowball offers is that if we respond back in a timely manner with something reasonable, that potential buyer is usually open to negotiation, and the deal comes together.
I’ve seen offers come in as low as $70,000 below list price, and we still ended up selling the property within $2,000 of the actual list price. So to start, don’t take it personally and don’t get your feelings hurt by a lowball offer. Put a strategic number out there, and when you counter, have your agent prepare some comps for the sale to show why you’re sticking to your guns and staying around your same price.
Don’t take lowball offers personally.
Maybe when you put those comps together and you’ve been on the market for three months or so, you find out that you were priced a bit high, and you need to come down a bit. It could be an eye-opening experience both ways.
Think about what you would do as a buyer. Are you going to write a full-price offer? Probably not, because you want the best deal possible as well. Treat that buyer with respect and give them something back in writing. Many times we have sellers that don’t want to counter back at all, but we always want to put something together to see if we can end up agreeing on something.
