Why Your First Offer Might Be Your Best Offer - The Powers Playbook ep. 17

Is the first offer on your home actually the best offer you’re going to get?

In this episode of The Powers Playbook, Aaron Powers breaks down one of the most common questions sellers face when their home hits the market:

Should I take the first offer, or wait to see if something better comes along?

It’s a question that comes up often in real estate, especially when a seller receives interest quickly. While it can be tempting to assume that a better offer is right around the corner, Aaron explains why the first offer is often worth taking seriously — and why waiting too long can sometimes hurt your negotiating position.

This episode looks at the thought process from both the seller side and the buyer side, helping you understand how timing, market activity, pricing strategy, and buyer motivation all play a role in the decision.

In This Episode

• Why the first offer may be your best offer
 • What sellers should consider before waiting for more offers
 • How timing impacts leverage in a real estate negotiation
 • Why early buyer interest can be a strong market signal
 • The difference between a strong offer and simply the first offer
 • How pricing affects the quality and speed of offers
 • Why sitting on the market too long can change buyer perception
 • What buyers should understand when making an early offer
 • How sellers can evaluate price, terms, contingencies, and timelines
 • Why every offer should be reviewed with strategy, not emotion

The Big Seller Mistake

One of the biggest mistakes a seller can make is assuming that the first offer is only the beginning.

Sometimes it is.

But sometimes the first buyer is the most motivated, most prepared, and most serious buyer you’re going to get.

In today’s market, sellers need to understand that the longer a home sits, the more buyers may begin to question why it hasn’t sold. That can affect leverage, negotiation power, and ultimately the final sale price.

What Sellers Should Ask

Before rejecting or ignoring the first offer, sellers should ask:

• Is this offer close to our target price?
 • Are the terms strong?
 • Is the buyer qualified?
 • Are there major contingencies?
 • How much activity are we actually getting?
 • What does our pricing strategy tell us?
 • What does our agent recommend based on the market?

The best decision is not always “yes” or “no.”

Sometimes the best move is to counter strategically and keep the conversation alive.

Advice for Buyers

For buyers, making the first offer can sometimes be an advantage.

If you find the right home early and move quickly, you may be able to start the negotiation before more competition shows up. But the offer still needs to make sense — both for your goals and for the seller’s expectations.

Thinking About Buying or Selling in Las Vegas?

If you have questions about:
 🏡 selling your home
 📈 pricing strategy
 💰 evaluating offers
 🤝 buyer negotiations
 📍 Las Vegas or Henderson real estate

reach out anytime.

📧 info@powersre.com

About The Powers Playbook

The Powers Playbook is your guide to family, wealth, and real estate.

Each episode helps buyers, sellers, homeowners, and investors make smarter decisions through practical conversations about real estate strategy, market trends, financial planning, and building long-term wealth.

Subscribe for more conversations about:
 🏡 Las Vegas real estate
 💰 wealth building
 📈 market strategy
 👨‍👩‍👧 family-focused financial decisions

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

You've opened the powers playbook. Welcome to Family World and Realistic. Hello and welcome back to the Powers Playbook, everybody. Welcome back to the show. We have another episode for you today. So why the first offer might be your best offer. I know we deal with uh buyers and sellers on this issue, so we'll try to cover both grounds, both sides. Most of it's going to come from the seller side, just because, you know, as the buyer, you never really know if you're the first offer, so to speak, unless the agent or people involved are going to give you that information willingly. As the seller, though, uh, you always know, right? How many offers you get, how quickly you get them, which one's the first. And over the years of doing real estate, I've had a lot of sellers over time, you know, express, well, this is just the first offer we've received. You know, maybe we should wait till we get more, or how long do we have to respond? Or, you know, what does that look like? And so this is something that's happening more and more in our market right now. And I just thought it was really important for us to take a moment and kind of explain the thought process involved if you are going to be selling or buying a home and what it means to be first. Okay, so we're gonna start with the seller side of things. And I think one of the biggest fears if you have as a home seller is, well, if I just take the first offer, I'm never gonna know what else was out there. And yes, I understand where you're coming from. And it it all depends on the market, right? If you're watching this uh, you know, three to five years from now, it could be a completely different conversation. If you were watching this five years ago, I would tell you there's no way we're taking the first offer, right? Because markets change. Now, back in the COVID days, uh, well, I say COVID of anywhere from like 2020 to 2022, we'll say, if you had a house on the market, you were likely going to receive three, four, five, ten offers. So in that case, yeah, we're gonna wait. We're gonna delay. We're gonna wait a full week on the market, you know, pick the best one to top three, um, negotiate them against each other and see who's willing to pay us the most, right? In our real estate market today, we don't have that luxury really anymore. We're not seeing a huge, you know, impact of multiple offer situations. Um, we're certainly not getting five or ten offers. Um, we may get a few. Um, and I think it's important to note that a lot of times the first one is generally going to be the best, and a lot of times is the one that we want to try to negotiate to close. All right, I'm gonna kind of go over and give you a few reasons why. Number one is really gonna be the market conditions, which are I kind of just explained the opposite. In our market right now, we are kind of seeing um a couple of different scenarios play out. The first one is we're generally gonna get the most interest in a property within the first, I would say 10 to 14 days, honestly, where you're gonna know, okay, I'm getting, you know, I'm getting a showing every couple days, or I'm getting, you know, one showing a day for the first 10 days. Like if that's the case, chances are you're gonna get an offer right away, or maybe even more than one. If we go 10 to 14 days and you've had one or two showings, you know, that's one showing every five to seven days, it's obviously not as much uh people looking at the house, right? So if we can receive an offer from either one of those people, even if we've only had two showings, chances are that's probably gonna be one of the best offers we're gonna receive because the house has not been on the market very long yet. And the people who are interested in buying it are probably been looking for a little while. They see what's on the market, they know it's newer, and they're gonna be willing to offer closer to what you're asking.

unknown 3:57

Right?

SPEAKER_00 3:58

So we're playing the supply and demand game in a sense here, and uh if we don't take the first offer with you know with the aggressiveness of what we should, we could be potentially waiting an additional two weeks, a month, 30, 60, 90 days to see what else may come forward. All right. So that's really the the key here is with our market right now, we don't want to wait to make decisions as a seller. We really want to try to put our best foot forward and say, okay, with the structure of the offer that this buyer made, can we make it work for us and for them? It's a much more even negotiating uh realm right now between buyer and seller. So as a seller, if you're gonna get your price, so let's just example, we have the house listed for $400,000, buyer offers you that price, maybe asks for some closing costs in return, a home warranty, um, potentially, you know, some sort of seller concessions is what we call them in there, but you're still getting your price up front, but having to give some concessions, that's a winnable deal. That's probably the best of what you're going to see. Right? So we want to try to negotiate that. And we don't want to make them wait around while we try to wait for other offers, because what happens is they will get antsy and they'll start to go look at other homes and potentially make offers on those. If that seller is quicker to accept, now all of a sudden our buyer is moved on to another property. So we want to make sure that we're we're not waiting and we're moving forward quickly with what comes forward. So what I've seen happen is if we have a property and it gets outside of that, you know, we'll say 10 to I said 10 to 14, we'll even say up to 20, 10 to 10 to 20 days, right? Two to two to three weeks. When we get past that period of time, generally the interest in the property will slow down because it's not new anymore. Now there are new properties have come to market, which are competition for those, which are now the new ones on the block that everybody's going to see. Also, when we get past that time and we get to 30 days on the market, you know, maybe even potentially a little more, we're going to start talking about reducing the price. Because we don't want the listing to just sit there, get stale, and do nothing. You know, we we if we're not getting the results we're looking for on the market, we've got to try and change something, right? And generally, the biggest thing that's going to change a buyer's mind about a property is price. There's a price that will sell just about everything. We just may not be marketed at a price that's causing someone to seriously consider it at that time. Okay. So that's why I think in our market, the first offer becomes very important because if we wait, then we may end up making far less trying to see what else is out there. Okay, so that's from the seller perspective. And we want to just be cognizant of the fact of we're not really in a market to be waiting. Um, generally speaking, properties will do just what I said. They'll either get a lot of interest right up front and we'll negotiate something and get it under contract, or we'll be priced a bit too high, or we won't necessarily like the offers at the beginning. We'll end up having to stay on the market longer, reducing the price, and then we're coming into a less profitable situation for the seller. Just in general, supply and demand for you guys. Anything that you're buying, I don't care what it is, it could be a house. Um, Al and I were actually talking before we filmed this about uh sports cards. Uh, at the same same general level, you could take anything. You could take uh the newest video game system that's out on the market. The longer it's out, does it sell for more or for less? The answer is generally less. The longer something is available, the less demand there becomes, and the and the lower price somebody's gonna be willing to pay for it. Okay, so houses are the same. If I'm a buyer and I'm looking at a house that's been on the market for seven days and I really like it, I know, hey, this thing's only been out here for seven days. These people just listed their house. We're probably gonna have to get pretty close to what they're asking. Versus, I go look at this house, I like the house, it's been on the market for a hundred days. Okay, well, my first question is why? Right? Why has it been here so long? Why has nobody else bought this house? What's going on with it? Right? Secondarily, okay, I do like it, and they're asking this price, but they've also been waiting a hundred days to sell it. So why would I not start lower and offer them less? Okay, so we're talking about psychology here of sales from the seller side and the buyer side. On the seller side, time is not on your side in most cases the longer you wait. Unless it's a very specific product where there's just not a lot of them out there. We could be talking about something in the luxury space that has a 14-car garage and there's nothing else like it in the area. Like that may sit on its own, that may be a different comparison here. We might be talking about something that is, you know, specifically only financed one way or you know, or or an introductory price point where you can get into something for under 300,000. How many of those are out there? So unless it's really unique, this rule is going to apply to most sellers in our marketplace, unless, like I said, it's just kind of something unforeseen. Okay. So switching over to the buyer side of things, we want as a buyer, we want to be looking, but we also want to be patient. Okay. On both sides, really, we want to be patient. On the seller side, I think you have to be slightly less patient just because we're not in an amazing supply and demand area anymore where there's 10 buyers that all want my house. You know, we're gonna be lucky to find one or two that want it, and we're gonna need to try to make it work with that person. As a buyer right now, there aren't as many of you. And there's a pretty good amount of inventory to look through. Inventory is not crazy high, it's not crazy low, it's kind of right in the middle. Um, but you have options. You can confidently go out and look at the market and say, okay, you know, I like these three houses. Which one do I like the best? Okay, let me see what I can do and put my best foot forward here if that's the one I really love. If it's kind of even and any of them will work, why wouldn't you try to potentially make an offer on one or two or potentially three of them over time and see which one you can get the best deal on? Right? Like I was saying before in my example of an offer with closing costs, if you need help from the seller or you're gonna ask for help from the seller because you know you can in the market right now, um, if you do that, it's a much better idea, in my opinion, to cut, give them pretty close to what the price is and then cut your costs off from there. If you're gonna try and say, okay, I want you know 10 grand off the purchase price, I want another 10 grand in closing costs, and I want, you know, it's it's gonna be harder to bridge the gap and get that deal done. I think if you really like the property, you know, let's look around and say, hey, this one for the price is just seems to be way better than everything else I've looked at, then go for it. Make an offer that makes sense to you. If it's kind of a wash across the board, then maybe you play and mess around and see which one you can get the best terms on. You know, which one will give you the most closing costs? Do you want to buy down your rate? Do you want to, you know, save some cash when you buy? A lot of different scenarios that you can go through. But I think on the same thing, if you're a buyer, you're looking in one of those two buckets. Am I looking for the best house on the market I can find? And if so, it's probably gonna be listed within that 10 to 20 day period of where I'm gonna find it. Because if it's really that great, it's not gonna last more than two or three weeks on the market. Because everybody's looking at the same properties, right? So the really good ones are still gonna sell pretty fast. Beyond that time, if I was trying to be savvy and getting the best deal I possibly can on something, maybe I'm looking for something that's been on the market for 70, 80, 90, 100 days that was just overpriced to begin with. Or maybe it's still overpriced and the seller, you know, wasn't willing to reduce 30 days ago, but they might be now. And what kind of deal can you make for that property? Right? Maybe it's something that needs a little bit of work or isn't in the you know best location or or backs up to a street, but you're okay to deal with that, and you can get a good, you know, better deal on that property. So it just depends. But I think as a buyer, you've got you've got some options. You can pick and choose, you can look for the right deal. Um, but definitely for sure that the the marketplace prefers the motivated. And so I think that will that will play um for the rest of the year, pretty much no matter what. If you're not truly motivated to buy or sell, I think it's gonna be hard for you to get a deal done in this market because we really need motivated parties on both sides. Sellers gonna have to be motivated enough to, you know, maybe come down a little bit or give the buyer some costs. Buyer's gonna have to be motivated enough to get at least close enough to the seller's price to make their terms and and concessions that they're asking for work. So it's it's one of the most even playing field negotiating markets that I've seen in a long time, meaning that the buyer and the seller are both gonna have to give a little bit. Neither one of them is gonna get the perfect deal, generally speaking. Um and as long as they're you know cognizant of that and willing to know that they need each other to work together, then we can find a way to make it work. But I I I really just want to make sure that we're we're taking the first offer for what it is, a genuine, legitimate, written offer to buy or sell a house. Right? I I tell all of our sellers if somebody took the time to actually write you an offer and send it to you, it probably means at some level they would buy your house. Now we just have to figure out what are the best terms we can get for you, right? And same thing for for the buyer. If if the seller, if you're taking the time to write an offer for that seller, we want them to, you know, know that and try to make it work or come back with us to something that they would accept. So remember, an initial offer is just a beginning point of negotiating. It doesn't mean you have to accept it as written. There are plenty we can counter back and forth and try to make the deal work. But more so than ever, I'm seeing in this market, the first offer really does hold precedent. And it could make the difference of whether you make, you know, an additional five, ten, fifteen thousand dollars in profit, or you sit on the market, you know, wait 30 days and potentially take 10 less because you wanted to kind of test it a little bit longer. So our market right now, I'm I'm really, you know, cautiously telling people, hey, we we really need to look at this first offer. We need to try to make this work. Let's not let's not be out here waiting for the next person. Let's be proactive and and do what we can to find buyers for our sellers, sellers for our buyers. That's that's our job. That's what we do. All right, so hopefully this was good information to kind of help you with some decision making moving forward. Um, if you have any specific questions, obviously you can reach out to us. If there's anything in Las Vegas or Henderson Real Estate or you're interested in knowing the value of your home, um please reach out to us. You can email us in email us info at powersre.com and uh we would love to help you. So we will uh catch you on the next one. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.