The Pros and Cons of Offer Deadlines in Real Estate Transactions

North Carolina Real Estate Broker Eric Andrews explains the pros and cons of “Offer Deadlines”. Eric explains there are pros and cons of offer deadlines. Eric likes to make sure that his clients receive full exposure to the market.

Speaker 1:           What are some pros and cons of offer deadlines?

Speaker 2:           All right, well first let me explain what an offer deadline is. So we put our property up Thursday at five. It’s getting a ton of showings. We know it’s going to be a multiple offer situation, and we perk up and we notify everybody on showing instructions and MLS, “All offers must be in Sunday at five.” Well, first of all, I certainly don’t like Sunday at five because you might have a situation when you say, “Hey, you need to be pre-qualified.” They don’t discover the property until Saturday. They’re caught with their pants down. They haven’t talked to their mortgage broker. So I like Monday or Tuesday better for if you’re going to do an offer deadline.

But offer deadline is a catch 22 situation. You can tell everybody, “Okay, the offer deadline is Monday at seven.” Saturday comes in, somebody’s rocking and rolling from New York. Your house is 500. They come in at 575, a hundred thousand dollars due diligence money. This offer expires, turns into a pumpkin Saturday night at six o’clock. And you came up with your offer deadline. I just think that puts the sellers in a bad situation. You should always be, “Why have an offered deadline?” And then sure enough, every time you have these offer deadlines, doesn’t matter what time I make the day or date for an offered deadline, I will get a call two hours before, “Eric, I’m really trying here. I can’t get it in by seven o’clock. Can you please give me until 10 o’clock?” It causes so many problems and everything. I don’t like saying, “This is what I’m going to do” and not change it.

So what I’ve done in the past is the hot listing hits Thursday at five. And I started getting offers in like Friday and Saturday morning. “When’s your offer deadline? When’s your offer deadline? When’s your offer deadline?” And I’m like, “That’s just not my philosophy. I don’t like offer deadlines.” I’m telling you that I think I would like full exposure of the market. So we’re probably going to give it the weekend, but my sellers reserved the right. If this is a strong offer, we reserve the right to take it now. So do what you got to do. But I usually like to give him some kind of indication, I’ll say, “Look, we’ll definitely have a decision by Monday or Tuesday or whatever, but right now, no offer deadline. Don’t like that.”