Reverse Offer For Selling Your House- Heard of it? It works!

Have you tried it all?  Mood music? Free car give away?  Burying a saint statue upside down in the front yard?  Here is a smarter and more strategic way of turning the transaction around to get buyers off the fence.  The reverse offer.

What is a reverse offer?   After a showing, the listing agent working for the seller of the property calls up the buyer’s agent and tells them the seller is willing to sell the house to them at a discounted price.  The idea is for the seller to make a reverse offer to everyone who has looked at the house.

No serious home buyer gets turned off by a seller is willing to go the extra mile to help them solve the problems that are keeping the buyer from buying a home.  Reverse offers don’t have to chop tens of thousands off the home’s list price to work.  A percentage point or two can often do the trick.   Sellers who extend a reverse offer don’t limit their options for responding to low-ball offers from the prospective buyer in any way.  If the buyer senses desperation and comes back with a low ball offer, the seller can still take it, counter or leave it.  Nothing different than they would have been able to do before, but they end up with a buyer, which they didn’t have before the reverse offer.  Most definitely worth a try!

Here are 3 great tips for sellers making reverse offers:

1. Give the buyers a short period of time to respond. The whole point of a reverse offer is to create urgency where the buyer currently feels none. Extend a reverse offer with the caveat that it is only good for a day or two, to push the buyers into moving quickly. Similarly, if you have extended the reverse offer to multiple buyers, let them all know that this is the case and that the first buyer to bite takes the house.
2. Great candidates for reverse offers include sellers facing lots of competition. If your house is nearly identical to neighboring houses for sale at the same price, or you are struggling to position it competitively with foreclosures and short sales in the area, consider making a reverse offer. A proactive, reverse offer differentiates your house in the minds of home buyers and, again, creates urgency to act on the part of buyers who otherwise have so many houses to choose from that they feel they have all the time, choice and bargaining leverage in the world.
3. If one buyer has viewed your home repeatedly, check in with your agent. Ask me to contact the agent for any buyers who have made more than one visit to your house, to inquire into what is keeping them on the fence. This will boost the likelihood of making a successful reverse offer by making sure the offer addresses the issues that have made buyers hesitant to pull the trigger.