Two offers arrive on the same property with similar terms. One of them is higher. Most sellers assume that settles it, and most of the time nobody gives them a reason to think otherwise.
What sellers look for in an offer besides price is a real question with a real answer, and for me it starts somewhere people do not expect: with the agent on the other side, and with what that agent did in the days before the offer was ever written.
This has come up several times over my career. In one of them we had two offers with similar terms and a difference in price. I recommended the lower one. My sellers agreed, and the transaction closed. Below is the reasoning behind that, what a listing agent can and cannot know about whether a deal will close, and what it means if you are the buyer trying to make your offer land.
Price is the easiest thing to compare, which is not the same as the most useful
A price is one number on one line and it can be ranked in four seconds. That is genuinely useful. It is also why price crowds everything else out of the conversation.
The trouble is that a price is a proposal, not an outcome. What a seller receives is whatever closes. An offer that falls apart in week three does not only cost the difference between the numbers. It costs weeks of carrying the property, a second round of marketing, and the market’s read on a home that came back with a story attached to it.
So the useful question is not which offer is highest. It is which offer is most likely to become a closing, and how much a seller is being paid to absorb the difference in risk between them.
What arrives before the offer does
Here is the part that surprises people. By the time offers are submitted, I usually have a reasonable sense of which buyers are serious, and none of it came from reading paperwork.
It came from the buyer’s agents. Some make contact early. They ask thoughtful questions, the kind that show they have read the disclosure package and are thinking about their client’s situation rather than gathering material for a form. They tell you plainly where their buyers stand. Others stay quiet and surface at the deadline with a document.
In the case above, the agent on the second offer had done the first of those. Through those conversations I became confident that the buyers were committed and that we were likely to have a smooth escrow and close on time. That was not a feeling about a person. It was an accumulation of specific behavior over days, and it was the most reliable information I had.
Why I recommended the lower offer, and what I told my sellers
I explained to my sellers that the highest price is not always the offer most likely to close successfully, and I recommended accepting the other one. They agreed. It closed.
I want to be precise about what I am claiming, because this is the kind of story that gets exaggerated in real estate writing. I am not saying the higher offer would have failed. Nobody can know that. I am saying that when two offers sit close on terms, the difference in the probability of closing is a real quantity, and a seller is entitled to have someone weigh it rather than pretend the ranking is obvious.
There is a related habit I would push back on: the belief that holding an offer back until the last possible moment creates leverage. In my experience it often does the opposite. It can make the offer feel less dependable, because the listing agent has been given nothing to verify and no time to verify it in. The agent who communicated for a week has handed the seller a reason for confidence. The one who appeared at the deadline has handed them a document and asked them to trust it.
If you are the buyer, this is good news
Everything above is something a buyer can act on, and it costs nothing. Have your agent make contact before you write. Have them read the disclosure package properly and ask questions that show it. Have them say, in words, that you are committed and why. Get your financing to a state where that statement is backed by something. None of that is gamesmanship, and none of it requires raising your price. It is the difference between an offer that arrives with context and one that arrives cold.
It works the other way too. When a listing agent sets out how they are running the process, read it. I have written separately about how I handle offer dates and early offers, and buyers who pay attention to that tend to write better offers.
Frequently asked questions
Q: Can a seller accept a lower offer?
Yes. Absent a specific contractual or fiduciary constraint, a seller chooses which offer to accept and is not obligated to take the highest number. If you are a trustee or executor rather than an ordinary seller, the analysis is different, and I have written about vetting offers on an estate sale separately.
Q: Does the highest offer usually win?
Often, and that is the right outcome much of the time. The point is not that price is a trap. It is that price should be weighed against the likelihood of closing rather than substituted for it.
Q: How do I make my offer feel more certain to a seller?
Early communication from your agent, financing genuinely in order, a clear statement of commitment, and terms that do not create avoidable uncertainty. The first item on that list is free and the most frequently skipped.
Q: Do listing agents and buyer’s agents really talk before offers come in?
The good ones do, constantly. That conversation is where most of what I know about a buyer comes from, and a buyer whose agent skips it is competing with one hand down.
The buyer’s agent is part of the offer
What this reinforced for me, and it has held up since, is that the buyer’s agent is not a delivery mechanism for the offer. They are part of it. An agent who communicates early and demonstrates that their buyer is serious gives the seller a reason for confidence that no line on the contract provides. When two offers are close, that reason is frequently what decides it, and a seller who only ever sees the numbers never learns the choice was there.
About the Author:
Mark Tauber is a Realtor with Coldwell Banker Realty, based in Burlingame and working throughout San Mateo County. He writes about how Peninsula transactions actually work, from preparation through close. You can read more about how he works with sellers or reach him through marktauber.com.
