How We Handle Lowball Offers in Phoenix

By The Goodman Taylor Team

We want to help you live the best life you can, one where you find your dream home, move to the perfect location, or receive a life-changing deal. We’ve done this for countless clients in the past, and we’d love to do it for you too. After all, there’s a reason why we’re one of the most trusted real estate teams in our area.

A lowball offer can feel personal. You’ve invested time, money, and energy into your home, and when someone comes in 20% below asking, the instinct is to reject it and move on. We hear it from sellers all the time: they don’t even want to counter. We understand the frustration, but our perspective is always the same. We’d rather have an offer to work with, even a bad one, than no offer at all. An offer gets the negotiation process moving, and sitting on the market with nothing to negotiate means nothing is moving forward.

We never want a deal to die with us. If we reject an offer outright without countering, we’re not even giving our sellers a chance to sell the home. Even if the counter goes back to the full asking price and the buyer walks, at least we know we did everything possible. Here are three things we do every time a lowball offer comes in.

1. Revisit the comps and make sure everyone is working with current data. The first thing we do when a low offer arrives is go back to the comparable sales and see if anything has changed in the market since we listed. We want our sellers to see what’s actually closing in the area, not just what neighboring homes are listed for. A home listed down the street might look like a strong comp, but if it’s been sitting for 120 or 200 days with no offers, it’s not really telling you what the market is willing to pay.

We sit down with our seller, review the latest closings together, and sometimes that data helps recalibrate where the market actually is. Just as often, though, those comps confirm that our pricing is right, and we’ll share that data with the buyer’s agent so they can see why the home is priced where it is. Sometimes the buyer simply didn’t realize how the home stacks up against what’s actually been selling.

2. Review every term, not just the price. Price gets all the attention, but it’s not the only thing that matters in an offer. We go through every term with our seller and find out what’s most important to them. Maybe the buyer came in low on price but is offering to close in 20 days, and our seller needs to be out of the house quickly. Maybe the buyer is willing to let the seller stay in the home for an extra 30 days at no cost. Those terms have real value, and they can shift how a lowball offer actually looks once you break down the full picture.

For every offer that comes in, we create a sample net sheet so our clients can see exactly what the terms look like and what they’d walk away with. From there, we figure out where there’s room to work with the numbers and which terms we can adjust to get closer to our seller’s target. We also pick up the phone and talk to the buyer’s agent directly. A lot of agents skip this step, but a conversation can reveal a lot. A buyer who submitted a low offer might be willing to come up significantly on price if we can accommodate them on other terms in the contract.

3. Always send the counter. Always. This is something we feel strongly about and have talked about many times between us. We never let a deal die on our side. Even if the counter feels like a long shot, even if the buyer says no, at least we know, as listing agents, that we’ve done everything we can to meet our seller’s needs, keeping the deal alive, always countering, always moving the conversation forward, gives our sellers the best possible chance of getting the best deal available. Walking away without trying is the one outcome we’re never comfortable with.

Watch our video for the full breakdown. If you have questions about how to handle an offer on your home or want to talk through your selling strategy, we’d love to hear from you. Call us at (480) 382-8093, email us at admin@thegoodmantaylorteam.com, or connect with us at thegoodmantaylorteam.com/connect. We’re here to help.