@Vinh Nguyen
I agree with both sides of the coin here, many have said if all you do is lowball, you likely will find yourself on a “not-wanted” poster or list of sorts and others say you can offer whatever you want to if it works for you and also add but it is best to run the numbers and base your offer from what the numbers and the research of that market area (as well as the length of time the property has been listed) to ensure your numbers are where you are basing your offer from.
I say both sides are right and I tend to lean more towards those that suggest running the numbers and doing you analysis so you know yourself that even if you submit what some may consider a so-called “lowball” offer that you offered that amount based off your analysis not just because you were trying to be ignorant and offer as little as you could. At least that way (like others mentioned) you can, if you choose to show the sell that the numbers don’t work out if you were to offer more and you weren’t try to insult them.
But as a side note, and I don’t mean this as a direct insult to anyone here that is a broker (because I don’t know any of you personally) but I have dealt with many, many brokers over the last 30 or so years and even had a major issue like what I am about to say, with our own personal property purchase, but sometimes brokers can either ruin a deal or even worse, can lie through their teeth and attempt to sabotage a deal if they feel you are not offering enough because that means their commission will drop too. In the matter of seeing them screw some deals up, I spent over 25+ years as a Conveyancing Paralegal so I worked on a lot of real estate transactions doing it all from top to bottom and so many times we had brokers that would cross the lines and we’d have buyers brokers helping the sellers doing one thing or another or telling them little secrets here or there about their clients and then we’d have the same thing happening the other way too of seller’s broker helping or telling seller’s secrets to the prospective buyers. They would create such a nightmare because the buyers or sellers would end up call us complaining about the issue that was revealed to the other side, as if we were the ones causing it. And my favorite one the often did was promising stuff to their clients that they had not right whatsoever promising, and I mean such things as they would get them discounts on something like their appraisal fee or something crazy like that and when the clients saw that there was no discount on the settlement statement they’d flip out and we’d be the ones that would have to explain that the broker had no right promising that.
But the ultimate “ignorant” broker problem I ran into was on a property hubby and I were buying and when we went to put in an offer (not this property had been advertised for over a year it was just a small piece of land) I had done my research in advance so I knew the seller, his address phone number, when he obtained the property even that he received it through an inheritance, everything, so I definitely had done my due diligence. So we contacted the broker to put in an offer and we were only going to put down a $100 with the offer paperwork and if accepted we would put down more earnest money. But the broker told us no the seller won’t except the offer without at least $1K down so I told her go put the offer in and then if he still says no fine we will discuss it then. Next day I didn’t hear from her, so I called her she claimed he would except it, I told her we’d get back to her. Being suspicious, I contacted the seller directly we had a wonderful conversation and found out she never contacted him at all. So we ended up going back forth like this with this broker through the whole deal and each time we’d call the seller to find out she never contacted him, he would have to contact her and practically tell her he knew someone was interested in the property. We told him he should fire her but he felt like he couldn’t. Anyway, we ended up doing the entire deal between ourselves and just going back and forth with the broker to keep up appearances. But dang straight she was right there on closing day to pick up her commission check.
So my point in all that (again I am not trying to say all brokers are idiots or anything like that) but just that sometimes the brokers can and will get offended by certain offers that you try to submit, but I feel it is not the brokers job to get involved in that part of the deal, they are hired to help the seller present his/her property in the best possible “light” so to speak in an effort to attempt to get the best possible price for the property and occasionally do a few necessities on the seller’s behalf (such as smoke cert., little things like that) and on the buyers side they are hired to find the properties that fit within the buyers parameters and help them arrange viewing and putting in offers (and occasionally they too will help with little things here and there like helping get HO ins., lining up the inspection, etc.). At least in this part of the country that is how it goes (Northeast Area, I’m in Mass. more specifically). Okay, well I think I have spewed way too much for one little post, so since I am probably going to get potentially a slew of “words” slung at me for this post I’m going to shut up now and turn the floor over to someone else, peace! ✌️
