What can a home seller do to help make a sale?

Respond to an offer in less than 24 hours.

Here’s what happens if you don’t:

  1. Once a buyer signs a contract, buyer’s remorse starts to set in. If allowed to fester for a day or two, buyers will talk themselves out of buying just because of the anxiety.
  2. There are just enough other new listings coming to market that the buyer’s wandering eye gets distracted easily.
  3. The longer it takes to get an answer, the lower the buyers want to counter.
  4. After about three days of waiting, buyers give up altogether.

On the other hand, when a seller does respond quickly, it gives the buyer the impression that the seller cares, and wants to make a deal.  Buyers respond more favorably to those!

I had buyers make an offer on Monday that was within 4% of the new list price (sellers raised their list price – our offer was $250,000 over their original list) and here we are on Friday with no answer.

In a different case this week, my buyers offered more than twice what the seller paid in 2002, and three days later it wasn’t good enough – the sellers had to have another $10,000.  This is a house that has been on the market for 100 days with no offers.

In both cases, we were sick of waiting around, and even a more favorable response wouldn’t have gone over that well.

Listing agents are notorious for not preparing their sellers on how to respond to offers.  You can predict the chances of a deal coming together purely by how quick the sellers respond.  If they are adequately motivated and the listing agent has their act together, you will get a response within 24 hours.

If not, there probably wasn’t much of a chance of buying it anyway.

Pin It on Pinterest