WHAT IF YOU GET AN EARLY OFFER?

If you get your 3P’s right, it is fairly likely you will get an offer on your property very early on in the marketing. Don’t be surprised. Remember my flowers and bees analogy?

The issue with an early offer is that it sometimes makes you question whether your property is too cheap but don’t let it. If you do get an early offer, I very much doubt it’s fluke.

Your agent has probably put in a lot of hard work to generate that offer and negotiate it up and that’s the way it should be.

Now I should mention here that it’s very important the offer is ‘qualified’ correctly by your estate agent, more on that later.

Expecting to be on the market for 3/6/9 months is the wrong approach. The only reason houses take that long to sell is because they were priced too high in the first place and its taken that long for the market to catch up with your asking price. Assuming its a rising market of course. If its a falling market, you will probably never sell unless you realign your asking price with the current market, or ideally, tomorrows market. But don’t panic, the market is currently rising.

It’s actually quite damaging for a house to sit on the market for a long time stagnating. Before making an offer buyers will pretty much always ask ‘how long has it been on the market’. If the reply is 1 week, they know they will have to make a good offer to secure the property but if the reply is 5 months, you can usually see the urgency run off their face.

Now you have that offer, assuming it’s realistic, embrace it, accept it and go out house hunting. Remember my advice ‘what should you do first, find a buyer or find a house to buy’

Over the years I have seen many clients refuse ‘early offers’ in the hope they will get more and in most cases they end up accepting the same offer, or sometimes less, a few months down the line resulting in unnecessarily prolonging their move and potentially missing out on suitable houses to buy.

All the best,

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