“Make an Offer! Please!” For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. –Newton’s third law I don’t know about physics, but then I suppose Newton didn’t know about real estate. In real estate, the equivalent to Buyers’ agents who verbally probe for, shall we say, Seller “price flexibility,” are listing agents who troll for showings and offers by intimating...Read More
“Some Day, Son, This Will All Be Yours” It’s a given that, in a market of some 20,000-plus Twin Cities home sellers at the moment, some are more motivated than others. Which ones? You can usually tell by how well each home is priced, staged, marketed, etc. But there’s another, surefire way to know that a...Read More
Passing on Unsaleable Listings Want a good Realtor to list (and ideally, sell) your home? In a Twin Cities market full of fussy Buyers and lots of inventory (with notable exceptions), you’d better meet the following three criteria. One. Be motivated. No, “motivated” doesn’t mean “desperate.” To a Realtor, a “motivated seller” is someone who’s willing...Read More
Softened-Up Sellers Do lowball offers ever work? Absolutely — just not in the way most would-be lowballers might expect. Instead of stealing the property from the Seller at a fire sale price, more often than not what they really serve to do is soften up the Seller for an offer from another Buyer. White Gray...Read More
Keys: Price — and Price Reductions How do you identify a motivated seller? No, it’s not because they scream on MLS that they’re “motivated,” “priced to sell,” “won’t last,” etc. Rather, the home is priced aggressively — and, if it doesn’t sell, is reduced at regular intervals thereafter. A good example of a home meeting...Read More
Disregarding Buyers’ First Offer Mulligan (ˈmÉ™-li-gÉ™n): a free shot sometimes given a golfer in informal play when the previous shot was poorly played. So, I think I’ve got a good name for today’s housing market: ‘The Mulligan Market.’ That’s because so many deals these days start out with the Buyer making an insultingly poor (out-of-bounds?)...Read More
