Multiple Offer Scenarios

Our next podcast discussing buying and selling in the current market is here! Check it out to learn a little about the selling side.

Today Marcia and I talk about the process behind handling having multiple offers for your property at once.

René Nelson, Eugene commercial real estate broker
Marcia Edwards, Eugene residential real estate broker

Buying & Selling in the Current Market – Part 2

Marcia Edwards: Let’s talk a little bit more about the supply side problem. There’s a shortage. It will be here for a while. We talked about that in the last program. Let’s talk now about how to navigate it if you’re a seller in the market.

René Nelson: Okay. So I get up every day to win and I want my clients to win. So there’s multiple competing bids for properties right now. Definitely in the residential world, and I’m seeing it in the commercial world. So I would love to hear from you, Marcia, when you’re dealing with multiple bids, what do your sellers look for? Is it just highest dollar?

Marcia Edwards: Well, 60% of the offers are coming in as multiple offers right now. So the majority of the time you’re going to be dealing with this. So it’s very relevant as a seller, to understand. First, I have to digress for a moment. It’s about pricing that creates this atmosphere. If you price and be at what you think will happen next in the market, you’ll miss out on this kind of auction atmosphere for a seller. So we should talk about that at some point.

But what you asked me was in regards to how do I prioritize the offers when representing a seller? There are several elements I look at. One is the liquidity of the money that they’re proposing would pay for this. So the quickest liquidity, the most apparent funds, is cash, but cash could be tied up in another property, could be tied up in a 1031 exchange process, it could be tied up in anything else. So you’ve gotta make sure that it’s liquid cash first and that’s available and they can get their hands on it and it’s in their name, not an insurance claim.

René Nelson: Okay. So I have a question about that, because I have a commercial property, where I received two cash offers, but what they were really doing were pulling cash out of other free and clear property. So when you see a cash offer, do you make them give you a bank statement to prove the cash?

Marcia Edwards: Yes. Yes. An online bank statement is not enough, because it doesn’t give you enough information. The current date, the current user of that account, it’s not all on one page, because they don’t want you to be able to print those for bad uses. And so, you have to go into the bank and get that. So it’s really to make sure that it’s liquid in a bank account and ready to go.

René Nelson: So don’t be an amateur and get yourself snookered, so to speak, by somebody who says, “Oh, I’ll pay you all cash,” when they might be doing something different. You really need an expert to be keeping an eye out for you, because if you take your property off the market and make it pending and then, 30 days later, something comes up and they don’t get ready to close, you put it back on the market, now your property is kind of marked, a lot of questions, like, “Why did it go back on the market? What’s wrong with it?” So be cautious.

Marcia Edwards: And hopefully they’ll reach out and ask those questions and not just eliminate it out of the gate. So you’ve gotta get that cleared up when you go Pending Sale.

René is available to answer your real estate investment questions. Schedule a 15-minute discovery call to better understand your investments and the market today.

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