Buyers Get Real!
By Jim Palmer Jr.

I had an experience with a buyer recently that I need to share.  One day I received a message from a broker who wanted to know if I had any offers on a certain property which I had listed.  I answered, “Yes, I already have one offer on the table, but we are still negotiating”. The pushy broker insisted that we wait on a final decision until their buyer could present a competing offer.  Then, the broker mentioned their offering price, which was far below the listed price of the property.

The seller had authorized me to tell the second broker that the first offer had fallen short and to tell them an amount the seller would actually take.   I readily shared that information with the eager broker so their buyer could be competitive.  Armed with that valuable information, I was sure they would present an offer that was closer to the number the seller was thinking.

After a short wait, I received the second offer which was much lower than what I had expected since we had given them insight on the previous negotiation.  That new buyer already knew the price the seller would agree to, but they had ignored that information.  Since the seller had spent time negotiating with the first buyer, they had already considered how they would respond to any offer and what their lowest price would be.  Even though the second buyer had the advantage of that knowledge, they still presented a weak offering that did not even come close to the magic number we had revealed to them.  That scenario reminded me of a high school wrestling match I had won by default when the other competitor failed to show up!

Puzzled by that waste of time and inept response, I wondered if that broker or their buyer has any clue about the intense market we are currently experiencing in the Spokane region.  I guess they were gambling that the first buyer might back out of the negotiation process completely or that the seller was lying about his stance on price.

The end of that tale is that the first buyer stepped up to the counter offer of the seller and the second anemic offer was left in the dust.  The moral of the story is that “it’s a seller’s market and buyers need to get real if they intend to compete”!