Selling Your Home Part 3/3: The Offer

Handling Offer(s)

If we’ve executed part one & two of this process we should have an offer on your home within a couple of weeks. This is generally us sitting in a room together and having Buyers throw money at us. Which is awesome but there are some curveballs that can be tossed at you along the way.

Setting an Offer Date

Also known as “Holding Back Offers.” This allows enough time for maximum exposure to achieve maximum dollars. On offer day we spend most of the evening at SPRING HQ’s boardroom meeting with the buyers’ reps as they present their offers often giving background on their buyers like who they are, what their cash position is and how bad they want the place.

We then decide who’s got the best offer and if there’s enough of a spread between the top offers and you’re happy with the price we accept one! Other options are to “send them back” and ask to improve but again since we’ve expertly priced the property, we don’t anticipate having this be a problem.

What if we don’t get any offers?

This can be really embarrassing but if this happens for whatever reason we simply regroup and get ourselves back on the market and try again. Of course we need to study the situation and determine why we didn’t solicit any offers. But we treat these on a case by case basis and since this hasn’t happened to us in the past eight years, we’d like to think we’re pretty good at pricing and soliciting offers.

What Makes A Good Offer?

There are FIVE major components of an offer that we focus on when decided, which to accept.

  1. Price – obviously this is a major deciding factor.
  2. Closing date
  3. Deposit – this shows us how strong they are financially. Some buyers are borderline purchasers and don’t have a ton of cash on hand. They’re relying heavily on financing and this may come to bite them on the butt come closing day so we try to steer sellers towards buyers with large enough deposits to ensure they’re financially healthy.
  4. Conditions – is it a firm deal? Do they have conditions they need to satisfy before firming up on the deal?
  5. Who’s the Buyer? – You may not think this matters but the buyer profile is very important. Do they still have a place to sell? How marketable is it? Will they come to us and ask for an extension if they can’t sell fast enough? What about cash on hand? So many questions that we like to answer before completely accepting an offer.

Offers can come quickly if you don’t set a date BUT of course many impatient know what they want and don’t want to wait until the offer date to submit. This is called a bully offer and we’ll get into th

The Bully Offer

When we list your home (especially if it’s a house or a larger condo) we’re going to get offers and they’re going to come fast. Sometimes the number is just too good to ignore but in our experience it’s always better to wait until enough people have seen the place to make sure we get max price. The only person that benefits from accepting a Bully offer is the buyer.

Unlock Toronto's Real Estate Secrets

Get Toronto's only weekly market report directly in your inbox

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.