How To Make A Lowball Offer With A Straight Face

In a tortured housing market filled with sellers desperate to unload their homes, today’s lowball offers are next month’s listing prices. If you’re in the market for a house, you have nothing to lose by disregarding the sticker price and putting in a comically low bid for the property. Doing so as a way to start negotiations is probably the best way to see just how low the owner is willing to go.

Blonde & Balanced offers this advice for submitting a limbo-style offer:

* Be direct. Don’t hem, haw or offer qualifiers or apologies. Just name your price with confidence and wait for the seller to respond.

* Forget about what you’re able to pay. You may be able to afford more, and even willing to go much higher, but that’s immaterial as far as these negotiations go. Use your leverage of being a rare person willing to buy a house and be prepared to walk away if you don’t love the price you’re getting.

* Be prepared to explain your offer. An offended owner might question how you came up with your price, so have a list of things that are less than ideal about the property to prove why your offer makes sense. “We’d have to remodel that kitchen,” “the projections say the house is losing 20 percent of its value every year” and “there are so many foreclosures in the neighborhood” are excuses you can nearly always use.

How To Make A Lowball Offer On A House [Blonde & Balanced]

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