All Forum Posts by: Joval Mathai

Hi @Joval Mathai,

I know it can be easy to get discouraged when you make offers like that and still nothing is getting accepted, but keep your head up--the Northern NJ market is just very competitive and tough right now. 

As others have mentioned, price is not always everything--you have to take into account the whole package of terms that you are offering, and how attractive the combination of price + terms is to the Seller. These can be things like Closing Date, Contingencies, taking the property with or without tenants, amount of deposit, down payment amount, etc.

Having an agent that knows what they're doing is absolutely essential in a highly competitive market like we're in now.

Asking price is a relative term.  If a home is worth 500k and listed at 400k, 100K over ask would makes a normal sale.  So much more goes into putting offers on multi family properties than just going over ask price.   I consistently win deals with lower offer amounts than what other realtors are offering simply becuase I bring a high equality reputation to every deal and when listing agent looks me up they see someone that has closed dozens of multi family properties last year alone. Most of the time listing agent will not push the higher price but the deal they are most confident will close.  Multi is not like ABC residential, for example is there are tenants in the property that is huge most seller will take offers that play into tenant terms.  I could go on for a while with hundreds of different scenarios what an offer should or should not included but its all based on the property itself. 

Hey @Joval Mathai Thats a really good offer. But just because an offer is the highest doesn't mean it strongest. There are a lot of things that you can do to make an offer stronger but with out knowing the situation I would guess this is what happened. The listing agent referenced her comps and saw that your offer was lets say $70,000 over what she thinks it would appraise for. In this scenario if someone offered $30,000 over asking with a $10,000 appraisal gap that offer would net the seller more money and be a stronger offer. Its really important to know why the seller is selling the property. If they are just selling to get top dollar they might be more willing to gamble and hope it appraises for higher and they are ok with having to go back on market. If they have a time line Then a lower offer that is more secured and has less chances of falling apart would be more enticing. Hope this helped!

NJ is ****ing crazy right now. If they said no, you didn't have the strongest offer. You can offer more money next time, waive inspections, etc. "Above asking" is irrelevant when every offer is above asking and some people are listing their property below expected sales price to drive more traffic.

did you waive inspections. Does your agent have the relationship with listing broker.

Hey @Joval Mathai, 

Not sure where Zillow pulls its data, I know www.greatschools.org is one of the main websites that uses proficiency to grade schools (how well they score on the yearly assessment scores) and also some weight is given to the schools growth scores (how well they are at furthering students scores). there is an interesting article/video by vox on all this is if want to learn more: https://www.vox.com/videos/201...

hope that helps!