When offering on MLS is it unreasonable or not to offer low?

[Derek Hemerick]

Hello all,

I am very inexperienced to the Real Estate game. What I do know is what I have learned from this site. I am currently in the market and looking for my first property. I have contacted a real estate agent who is looking for homes in the area on the MLS. From what I hear this isn't the best method for finding motivated sellers but its the only option I have being in the Military and just recently finding out that I am moving. My agent is sending me properties that look like in range of what I'm looking for but not at a very good price. He told me that the properties in the area will not accept low offers and that to find investments you have to usually bid over what is asked. Listening and reading material on this site I feel like this is wrong and I might have the wrong Agent for me. I also don't know if maybe my expectations are too high for the MLS and I might just need to be realistic about offers on there. The agent I am using contacted me on BP but I don't really know who to trust just yet.

So my question is when putting in offers on the MLS is it unreasonable to ask an agent to lowball offers on properties based on what I would cashflow for, or do I need to just keep looking for that gem that pops up with an asking price that works with the numbers. If I should keep asking my agent to offer what i think is right maybe I have the wrong agent for me to get a true cashflow rental property. Thank you everyone for your help.

[Russell Brazil]

You need to learn to value the property. If the property is worth $100k and the list price is  $100k then offering $50k is a waste of everyone's time. In the same vein if the property is listed at $100k, but the value is $200k, then offering the list price is a waste of time. If the list price is $100k and the value of the property is $50k, then there is certainly nothing wrong with offering $50k.

The list price may or may not have any correltion to the properties value or eventual sales price.