I received another “Builder Incentive” email in my inbox this morning. “There will be a drawing this weekend for a hotel stay and no reasonable offer will be refused”. It made me pause and ask, “What makes one offer ‘reasonable’ and another not?” In the early 90′s I wrote a very ridiculous offer on a Builder owned property, which of course was rejected. I was a “newbie”….I’m sure my clients had bought and sold more homes than I had, and I allowed that to intimidate me. We wrote the offer low and asked for the moon…., furniture, new deck planters and benches to be built, fence, paint….oh, and we were about 10% low on purchase price when the market was indicating homes were selling within 1-2% of List price!!! The laundry list of requests took up a whole 8 1/2 x 11 blank addendum. Of course we were shot down, the builder didn’t even counter. I remembered that offer when I received the email this morning and I know that somewhere an agent is writing a ridiculous offer that a builder will think is unreasonable. So what’s the difference? How low is too low? How much is too much to ask for?
