Agent turning "by negotiation" into a tender?

[lukasr]

Hi folks,

A property is advertised as "by negotiation" so I thought I'll put an offer on it and negotiate with the vendor. But the agent selling the property says "you have a few more days as I am collecting offers and will present them to the vendor on day X. I also have somebody that can only come around in a few days time and until they've seen the property I will not be presenting any of the offers anyway."

This smells.

Firstly, why not make it a tender process rather than by negotiation if you're effectively conducting a tender?

Secondly, Is the agent allowed to favour one potential buyer over another even though she hasn't seen the offers? What if the vendor is happy with our offer and doesn't want to wait until the other party "has time to look at the property"?

Any comments appreciated..

[halfempty]

Either:

1 Tell him to stuff it and walk away or

2 Speak to his sales manager and ask that your offer is presented

3 Or contact the owner directly and make them aware that you want to make an offer on their house and the agent is slowing the process

4 Or make a conditional offer at above asking then don't return his calls for a couple of weeks.....

(Only 1/2 joking about the last one)

[DazRaz]

Oh! I thought you were ½ joking.

[halfempty]

Depends which 1/2 your talking about..

[captaincrab]

Hi Lukasr
I think the Agent is being careless with his language. What he is probably trying to say to you is that you are or will be in a multiple offer situation.
Which is not the same as Tender.Always tricky to deal with....They usually pick the best and negotiate with them first.
good luck

[mortgage broker]

You will find that the agent is probably trying to achieve the best price for the seller

[cube]

I understand that the rules around 'Tenders' have been tightened, so agents would may previously have done a tender will now find other wording to achieve the same result, e.g. 'Fixed Date of Sale'

If you are keen on the property, then I'd go with #2 above for 24 hours and then #3 (you don't need to tell the vendor what your offer is, just that the agent is getting in the way!)

[donna]

Why would a vendor go with a 'tender'? The house next to ours is up for sale and they started the open home process 4 or 5 weeks out from the tender date and over the weeks there's been less prospective buyers viewing the property. The owners said they had an interested party from the first open home but they were told they needed to wait 5 weeks before their offer was reviewed - the last two open homes have been dire with the last one cancelled.

In the meantime the first interested party has more than likely been viewing other properties and may not even submit an offer due to finding another property. This 'tender' process doesn't seem to favour the vendor if their property is more niche. It is more secret squirrel too as there's no indication of vendor sale price expectations. So the vendor waits 5 weeks till they can view the offers and if they are ridiculous - they are rejected and 5 weeks have gone by with a negative result.

The property in question is way over capitalised and the CV is way under the vendor's expectations yet that is essentially what the prospective buyers have as the basis of their offer - it seems counterproductive to use a tender unless the property is easy to value and there's likely to be lots of interest.

Cheers,

Donna

[essence]

Most buyers have the attention span of a gnat!!! Making them wait 5 weeks before they put in an offer...... what do you know's going to happen?? Nothing.

Unless the property has something extra special for a good price, then it's competing with all the same sort of houses on the market now.

If I was the vendor, I'd be kicking the agent's patootie.

[mortgage broker]

Some vendors don't want the hassle of calls at 9pm, over the weekends and or going through an emotional roller coaster every week. Also when there are many parties involved such as an estate liquidation a tender is the easiest way of getting all the offers looked at once

[lukasr]

Closure..

Just for some closure on this one.

Turned out that the vendor wanted to sell quickly (as in asap) and a normal tender process would have drawn out the sale for several weeks. From the agent's point of view I can see how they wanted to stall (slightly) to get in a few more potential offers and make it a multi-offer situation to get the best price for the vendor.

What we did..
We acted quickly to put in a lower (but still reasonable) offer - in case there wouldn't be any other offers.
But the agent did manage to get (two) other offers in in the next couple of days so it became a multi-offer situation.
Because we were the first ones in (when it wasn't a multi-offer yet) we were able to "update" our offer on the basis of this multi-offer situation as there were other potential interested parties.
We increased our offer so that it became our "best offer" (in the words of the multi-offer notification form we needed to sign).
6 days from us having seen the house for the first time our offer was accepted.

[TheLiberalLeft]

Did you get the agent giving the wink wink as you entered the number in the box?