Quote from @Mary Schlabach:
We are rookie investors looking to buy a lake house. We suspect there will be a bidding war.
What can we do/offer to make our offer more enticing so that they would accept our offer over others that might have offered more?
Find an experienced agent to work with who can help your offer stand out. Here are a few things that I have done before: (these are just examples and ideas and shouldn't be considered advice as I don't know your specific situation)
1. offer a large earnest money deposit, this shows you are serious and costs you nothing extra as it all goes towards your closing costs/down payment and if you overpay it will be refunded to you at closing (but it could be at risk if you get wild with waiving contingencies and/or you back out of the transaction without a contingency)
2. write an offer letter to stand out, but be careful not to violate any fair housing laws, these letters are not allowed in some states because of the possibility of violating fair housing laws.
3. offer a shorter inspection period, but make sure you still give yourself enough time to perform the inspection
4. if you know enough about inspecting a property yourself and you feel comfortable doing a visual inspection when you are viewing the property you can make your offer "as is" and still have an inspection period as a contingency, but you won't ask for any repairs. I don't usualy recommend completely waiving the inspection period.
5. if you have extra cash available and you are very confident in comparable sales you can waive the appraisal contingency fully or up to a certain $amount. I have done this before and then the appraisal came back higher than my offer because I had great sales comps, but I have heard of other people doing this and they had to come out of pocket $50k because they didn't have comps/the appraisal process is not an exact science and can be somewhat subjective.
6. you can write an escalation clause into your offer, so your offer will start at a certain price and increase to beat the highest competing offer by $1k up to a certain max offer amount.
7. offering cash can make your offer stronger, and then doing delayed financing, if you don't have enough cash you could get a bridge loan to help, but that can also be expensive.