Working With Buyers In a REO Market

[Bryant Tutas]

Making offers on Multiple properties. Do your Buyers do it? Mine do. And here’s why.

In the Central Florida market right now REOs (bank owned properties) make up a HUGE percentage of the saleable inventory of homes. Most sell very quickly, for higher than listing price and with multiple offers.

This can be very frustrating for Buyers and their agents. It seems like every time you make an offer on a REO property it is either pending or a bidding war is going on. So what do you do?

What I do is have my Buyers make offers on numerous properties at the same time. We don’t even look at them. If a good property comes on the market I send an offer for my Buyer to sign and then we forward it right on to the REO agent. We want to get into the game.

Last week I presented 14 offers for one Buyer alone!!! My Buyer’s intent of course was to only purchase one property. Luckily we received acceptances on 2 of the 14. My Buyer was so excited he changed his mind and decided to buy both!! You just have to love it when that happens.

It happened to me this week too. So….submitting multiple offers turns out to be a very good thing. The Buyers are not only getting the property they want but they also getting a second one as a bonus!!

Now listing agents are probably not thrilled about this as we end up withdrawing a lot of offers. I had a conversation with one of the REO agents last week who asked me if the Buyer had seen the property. My answer was “no”. He seemed to be a little perturbed and actually said I couldn’t do that. Said I was “playing dirty”.

Now folks…..I don’t think I have ever seen a law that stated a Buyer needed to see a property in order to make an offer on it. Have you?

We look at the property between the time the offer is verbally accepted and the time the bank sends us over the final addendums. As you know, if you sell a lot of REOs, this could be a day or 2 weeks. Whatever it is it’s plenty of time to pop over and check out the property.

I’ve been primarily a Listing Broker my entire career. I think I’m getting pretty good at this Buyer stuff though. Am I playing dirty or am I just doing the best I can for my Buyers? What say you?