Zillow.com Advice

On Trulia.com, anyone can post questions and have agents and real estate professional answer their questions. This is concerning a very frustrated woman who has made 3 offers on a bank owned property to no avail. Come to find out the listing agent wrote an offer for one of his own buyers and their offer was accepted and was less than her final offer. She becomes slanderous of the other agent in her question (which is why I'm not posting her question verbatim), but I attempt to get to the bottom and find a solution.

Here was my response:
It is extremely difficult when dealing with banks, and circumstances (no responses) like what you have explained happen often in the reo world. I coach buyers in these situations to place their strongest offer initially because I have seen this happen often. Banks have many reasons they accept the offers they do, they are under no obligation to respond quickly to your offer, and they are not likely to negotiate with you, when you place a low offer in the first week or so of an REO listing. 

Here are a couple questions that could help us see why you did not have your offer accepted:

- How long was the property on the market?

- Was your offer a cash offer?

- What was the home worth to you? 


These are important, because if the property was on the market for a very short time, and you were willing to pay $65k for the home, your initial offer should have been between $60k and $65k. List price is essentially irrelevant in these situations because homes that scream value will sell at or above list price 95% of the time. 

note: Some banks require the home to be on the market a certain amount of days before they will even look at the offer. Often 10-13 days. 

Was your offer a cash offer? This is important because I have seen the banks accept offers, that are not necessarily the highest offer, because it is cash. This could be the situation on yours. This is why I encourage buyers to make a strong offer initially, because you can encourage the bank to make a quicker decision, drastically increasing your chances getting an offer accepted. 

I hope this helps. 


You can read her questions and other answers by clicking here.