Thread: Offer amount

Originally Posted by Happy2630

Hello everyone, I'm looking to relocate to the Western NY area where the economy and real estate market were less than ideal even before the recent downturn in the overall market.

I am currently considering entering an offer on a house being sold by a relocation company. The house has been on the market for over six months and the asking price has already been dropped from $335K to $280K. It is in a very nice development were most of the other houses are (guessing here) valued from $75K to $150K more.

My question is given the amount of time that it has been on the market, as well as the soft market, how much below asking price could I realistically go. I have talked to others who are purchasing homes in the area and they have all said with the current buyers market that I should low-ball them ruthlessly.

Another issue is we have shown interest in this house once before and the relocation company agent notified us that an offer was expected that day from another party and we should hurry and place an offer if we were interested. We declined since the house was at the high end of our allocated budget and didn't want to get into a bidding war. This was about two weeks ago, I then recieved an email from my agent last week showing that they had dropped the asking price another $20K. When we re-inquired about the house this morning there were no offers. However, by the end of the buisness day two supposed offers had magically materialized.

To me this sounds like the seller agent trying to pressure us into an offer and perhaps higher than we want. If this is the case would this inicate to you that the agent is getting pressured to get the house off the books and if so how does this improve and/or affect my position as a potential buyer?

Thanks for your help and sorry for the long post!

First of all, welcome to the Real Estate Forum!

For a little background, I work with several Real Estate Industry professionals throughout Central and Wester NY. That being said, I know that there are select "bubbles" where the national market is not having an affect on that particular city market. So, be careful if you choose to low-ball that offer. If you go too low, the seller might rebell. If you go too high, you will be losing out on money that you could've saved.

I would think $15-20K less than the current asking price is reasonable, and ask them to pay a full 5% concession towards closing costs.

The nice thing about working with companies as sellers is that they usually don't get insulted when you submit a low ball offer. I don't think you would be out of line to offer them 250K.