Communicating low ball offers to my (buyer) agent

[Michael Hunt]

Hello.

We're looking to purchase our first primary residence in a HCOL area. We have a budget range (~$900k - $1.0M) that we'd like to communicate to our agent, but also wanted to let him know that we'd like to make some lowball offers to nicer places to see if we can get it down to our range. For example, we'd be offering $1.0M on a $1.1M listed place.

I was going to ask to see if we can get two MLS alerts set-up: (1) one for directly in our budget $0.9M to $1.0M and (2) one for lowball offers $1.0M-$1.1M. Is this a common tactic? What's the best way of going about this so that we don't waste anyone's time?

Thanks