Is a Lowball Offer a Bad Offer?

All offers are good offers. You just need to decide how you are going to respond to or leverage an offer. The first thing to understand is that often the reason for a buyer’s lowball offer has to do with their own emotional attachment. They see and love your house, but also start seeing the repairs and improvements they would like to make. Then, they start slashing those estimated costs off your listing price.

Here’s the thing: they love your house. With recognition and minimal concessions, whether it is on the closing timeline, earnest money, closing costs or price, you may see drastic movement on the buyers behalf. Ninety percent or more of the time, the first offer you receive after counteroffers to their highest point, will be the best offer you see during your active time on the market. So what if you have pretty high activity on your listing but you get a lowball offer?

Whatever you do, don’t ignore it, leverage it! To properly leverage a lowball offer, buy yourself some time. Have your agent let the buyer’s agent know that due to high activity, you want to think about it over the next day or so before countering. During this time, you want to let any showings booked go through over the next day or so, and let new potential buyers know that there’s already an offer on the house after their viewing. Then, let any potential buyer’s agents know you have another offer you’re planning on countering soon.

You are now using the first offer as “bait” to get other bigger offers. If no bigger or better offers come, then counter that first offer you received.