Terminating the offer if the seller agent asks for offer revision
Let say You give an offer of 1m. Then the seller agent comes back and says our offers are around 1.1m and you have a few hours to revise and give your best offer. You revise your offer to 1.11m. The same thing happens with other buyers. Then you lose the bid and someone closes the house at 1.13m. most probably your offer was 2nd highest and was used to extract 1.13m from the buyer. Thinking if any seller asks for revision we would just terminate the offer rather than revising it to screw these sellers. I wonder if we terminate the offer when sellers ask for revision will they still be able to still take your original 1m offer as baseline and get the escalation or it's gone now?
Game theory. If you are the only one doing this, you would lose most of the time. There is a better approach to this negotiation.
What is that better approach?
Your offer should have an expiration date. The seller cannot accept it after expiration. Also, assuming your offer has contingencies you can always back out.
It's not about backing out. But terminating the offer if you know you can't win it so that your offer is not used as a baseline for the escalation clause to extract more $$ from the winner bid
You can have your agent send a cancellation notice if they didn't accept it yet.
When they counter, they are rejecting your offer and proposing a new one. Since there was no meeting of the minds, there is no contract. Your agent knows what the right response is to ensure all legal stuff is taken care of, but a simple "I reject your counter and withdraw my previous offer" should suffice.
It’s just how the game is played when there’s more buyers than sellers
When you make your counter to their counter, give them only 1 hour of time to accept. That would not give them enough time to negotiate with the other buyers.
To add, its not “few hours “ but few minutes. Since multiple buyers make counter offers within short time. The contract expiration just holds your best offer for that duration and seller can reject as he has multiple offers.
Just reduce the offer to 950k, rub some salt on your way out
That's a nice way out actually
No agent in the right mind will accept to do this lol, their reputation is spoiled
Generally in a bidding you always place escalation clause as a default. It doesn't matter if you cancel it, the moment you put it down seller got the leverage. Unless somehow all the buyers now decide not to buy.
So if you cancel also can the seller use that canceled offer as leverage with other buyers?
The only option I can think where seller can't leverage is if you withdraw before offer review date. In that case yes seller can't use it. But then how will you win an offer ever in a bidding war.
A home was listed for 2.5m with an open home on the weekend, it was taken out before that and if we wanted to put in an offer seller agent said don't come with anything lesser than 2.8+. We didn't even put in an offer, had we done it we think it would've kept escalating to 2.9. Sometimes it's ok to back out so comparable doesn't get too high but the downside is we can't win any home because there will always be some crazy person.
Just say that is my final offer.
Ya that's an option but you know you can't win with that. Why not terminate and let the other buyer have a less baseline for escalation if that can be done. screws these seller agent tricks
It doesn’t matter.