Navigating an Insulting Offer

You’re a seller and your house did not sell the first day it went on the market or the first day you reviewed contracts and offers. You’re a few weeks in and you get a wildly off-the-mark offer on your house. What do you do?

Over the years of being in real estate, I’ve seen sellers react badly to getting an insulting offer. If your house is priced properly to begin with you should be able to expect a reasonable offer (or more than one reasonable offer!), not a lowball offer… but you can’t control what people do.

And for some reason when people start buying real estate, they think, “I’m a good negotiator, I’m going to do this!”. But the reality is, most people are not good negotiators and it ends up irritating the other party – whether it’s the seller or the buyer.

So if you are a seller and you receive a poorly constructed offer, the thing to do is to take a positive, high road perspective and just go “nice try, but here is a realistic counteroffer” and just keep steady on the mark. If you get dramatic and make an overaggressive counteroffer, you’re just not going to get anywhere. And if you ignore it, then you’ll never know whether they’ll take a reasonable counteroffer.