3 Secrets Top Selling Agents Will Tell You About Multiple Offer Situations

When selling your home, it’s always good news to receive bids from different buyers. However exciting, a multiple offer situation requires skill, insight, and experience to determine which buyer to move forward into escrow with.

By working with a top agent in your market, you’ll have an expert guide to help you decide which offer to accept and how to properly negotiate the terms of sale. By observing your local market, a top agent will create a custom plan to ensure that you are choosing to accept the offer that aligns with your best interests as a seller.

3 Top Selling Agent Secrets for Navigating a Multiple Offer Situation

If you spoke with a top selling agent about what to do in a multiple offer situation, here are some pieces of advice they would give you.

#1. Review All the Options

The most basic tip for sellers in a multiple offer situation is to closely review all of the different options being presented.

When you receive multiple offers, they will not all be the same. Offers made on a home can include different elements and documents, including:

• Proof of funding
• A personal letter
• Earnest money
• Escalation clause
  

By simply reviewing the offer, you’ll be able to get a better idea of what kind of transaction you’d be getting yourself into if you were to approve the various offers.

For example, your top agent would tell you that an offer with earnest money could be viewed as a more serious and dedicated buyer than an offer placed without that add-on.

Earnest money is given by a buyer to show the seller that they are very interested in the listing and are not placing offers on other homes. This kind of offer may be a green light for sellers that want a stable, reliable, and trustworthy buyer.

On the other hand, a buyer that has included an escalation clause may be most appealing to sellers that are interested in selling their home for the highest value. An escalation clause is included in the offer to communicate a buyer’s willingness to increase their initial offer by a certain percentage in the case that the seller receives a higher, competing offer.

A multiple offer situation is not always cut-and-dry, so having a top selling agent by your side is essential as you review the options and find the offers that most align with your home selling goals.

#2. Consider Financial Backing

After reviewing and rating the offers that were placed on your home, a top selling agent will begin investigating the financial backing of each buyer. When in a multiple offer situation, sellers need to be wary of buyers that bid high prices without actually having the funds to support their offers.

If you were to accept an offer made by a buyer without financial backing, you could end up moving into escrow with a buyer that eventually won’t be able to afford your home, resulting in the possible termination of the deal.

To help sellers avoid these situations, a top selling agent navigating a multiple offer situation always looks beyond the dollar value.

Your agent may ask follow-up questions with the buyer's agent or request proof of financing before accepting an offer. In some cases, it could be safer to choose a lower offer amount with strong funding from a mortgage lender or cash account than to choose a higher offer with unclear funding.

As a general rule, top selling agents will look for proof of pre-approval, pre-qualification, and other mortgage approval documents to ensure that the buyers have been taking steps to secure their financing.

#3. Leverage Contingencies to Meet Your Needs

When selling your home, you should always prioritize your individual needs. Perhaps you need to sell your home by a certain date, or you need to make a special request — like a lease-back, where you need to rent the property from the buyer for a set period of time after the transaction.

In these cases, a top selling agent will negotiate the sale’s contingencies to accommodate your needs. When you’re in a multiple offer situation, these circumstances would need to be discussed with the buyers making an offer on your home before you accept any offer and move into escrow.

Meet Your Perfect Agent  

Ready to meet your top selling agent to help you with all things related to your home sale — including a possible multiple offer situation, negotiations, escrow, and closing? Get connected with the perfect agent on RealEstateAgents.com.
For more real estate advice and insights for sellers, browse through more articles on the RealEstateAgents.com Blog.