
When your house has been on the market for quite a while and you have already dropped your initial asking price, it can come as quite a shock to get an offer to purchase for even less than the reduced amount.
“But before you get angry and reject the offer out of hand as being insulting, you should try to remember that you actually just won a sort of lottery, because out of all the homes currently on the market, these buyers decided to make an offer on your property,” says Gerhard Kotzé, MD of the RealNet estate agency group.
“Before that happened, they very likely did their own market research, got bond approval for a certain amount, and visited and compared several homes for sale in the correct price range, and now all they are trying to do is buy the home they liked the most (yours), for the lowest price possible.”
This means, he says, that the best way to treat their offer is as the “opening bid” in a negotiation. “So before you start losing sleep about why they think your home is worth so little, just start talking to your agent about what your counter offer should be.
“In order to work this out, you need to do two things, the first of which is to get your agent to find out what it is about your home that the buyer does not like and resulted in the lower-than-expected offer.