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We are in the process of selling our house, the same house that when we bought it, we bought because of the opportunity we saw in the land and buildings to make it into the home we wanted it to be for our family – it was also at the time going to be our home for the foreseeable future.
When we negotiated for the house we were negotiating with owners that had spent the last 28 years in the house. They clearly had a lot of sentimental attachment to the house, but to me the buyer this sale was purely getting the homestead for as low a price as I could.
Fast forward 5 years and we have come to the end of our stay in the home and it is just now that the home looks like the home I imagined when we bought the house. Today we also received our first offer on the house – it was ridiculously low balled and our first reaction was that we had been slighted and victimized so in retaliation we rejected the offer.
… fortunately good help was close at hand and we were mentored through the errors we made.
Firstly we had to get to grips with what was happening – we were selling a piece of land and buildings, there can no longer be any emotional ties to this property otherwise we wouldn’t be selling it.
The buyer is looking at the property through their vision of what the property can be for them. The agent is responsible for identifying and selling the strengths of the property to enable the buyers vision. By virtue of the fact that we had an offer the agent had completed their obligation.
By us refusing the buyers ridiculously low offer closes the door and ends the conversation. Our response of a rejection may even have offended the buyer in the same way their low ball offer did to us.
The better response is to respond with a counter offer, at or very near to your asking price. This signals to the buyer that you are interested in working with them. Once this process begins the buyer is now in the thought process of getting the object of his desire. In the majority of cases a common ground can be found and the transaction completed when you approach the sale in this way.
Another benefit of this is that even though you have not accepted the offer, the property is effectively under “negotiation”. What this does is it heightens the sense of urgency for any other potential buyer and with a right to first refusal, means that you could easily accept a better offer.
A far more powerful option than closing the door by rejecting the offer – if during negotiation a mutual agreement cannot be reached you can still easily walk away from the offer – remember it is just a piece of property.