Smart Home Buying

By MaryAnn Shoemaker on May 2, 2010

Why Don’t Home Buyers Make Offers on Overpriced Listings?

They don’t want to offend the seller. It goes against human nature to offer substantially less than asking price to a seller. It’s insulting to the seller and embarrassing for the buyer.

Buyers erroneously believe that the seller knows the home is overpriced. They believe that if a seller would be willing to sell for less, the seller would simply lower her price.

Buyers also assume that the seller must have turned down low-ball offers from other buyers because surely someone, somewhere along the line, had offered a reasonable price to the seller. But many times, there are no offers at all.

How Do You Find an Overpriced Listing?

The easiest way is to ask your Realtor about the average days on market (DOM) for your area. Multiple listing systems are designed so it’s fairly easy to compute the DOM. Then ask your Realtor to sort through the listings and give you a print-out of every home that has been on the market longer than the average DOM.

If your Realtor is a neighborhood specialist, it is likely they have toured these homes and has intimate knowledge of condition and layout of these homes. Ask them to share this information with you. You can also ask your Realtor which of the homes they think are overpriced as well. You will be amazed to learn that often agents don’t tell listing agents whether their listings are overpriced because agents don’t want to offend anyone either! But listing agents aren’t infallible. Sometimes they make mistakes when estimating market value prices for a seller. Ultimately, however, remember that it is always the seller’s responsibility to select the sales price.