Dealing With Identical Purchase Offers for a Fixer in Rancho Cordova

Identical purchase offers need something to make the best offer stand out.

When I first introduced this fixer home in Rancho Cordova to the market, I did not think we would receive a bunch of identical purchase offers. Usually the way these things go, agents advise their buyers to submit sales prices all over the place. Plus, there are usually always those kind of buyers who won’t pay list price for any home. They don’t care if it’s underpriced, they simply refuse to pay list price and expect a break on the price. But we didn’t get any of those kinds of buyers. That’s not to say we didn’t get a knucklehead here and there.

I should point out this was a home we had priced at $225,000. Not because we deliberately wanted to cause a ruckus but because that’s the amount at which the last fixers in the area sold. Identical purchase offers? Wasn’t even a goal. We just hoped for the best offer from the most motivated buyer who could quickly close. One agent wrote to ask why the confidential remarks stated “submit your best offer over list price.” Um, because we wanted to pick the best offer that exceeded our sales price and we were not considering any offers less than that?

Another buyer submitted an offer at $237,500. They were doing a 1031 exchange and were running out of time during their 45-day time period to select a property. The seller said, hell yes, that’s a good offer. We had motivation. Except we also had a pile of $240K offers on the table. So we countered the 1031 exchange buyers at $240K. They had to “think about it”, initially, which meant they probably had written other offers which is definitely not kosher nor legal. They did not seem like ethical buyers. We withdrew the counter offer.

There were also a few of those brown noses insisting on working directly with the listing agent. Hoping we would sooo love to double-end the transaction that we’d double-cross our sellers, break fiduciary. They think they can throw money at agents, and obviously sometimes they can, or they wouldn’t do it. Doesn’t work in my situation. I won’t work directly with them, so their evil little plans backfire. They can work with my team members or they can get their own agent, I don’t care.

Let’s not even talk about the agent who damaged the home by kicking in the garage siding, twice. With his client standing right there. Then allegedly he swore at the witnesses who shot photos of his car. Good thing he didn’t write an offer.

So many identical purchase offers. And then one identical offer was suddenly different than everybody else. It contained no contingencies, they were actively removed, a huge earnest money and the buyer agreed to deposit all of the cash into escrow right away. Same price but much better terms. We closed escrow 7 days later at $15,000 over list price with 11 offers.