How I Run a Multiple Offer Process for Sellers
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We listed a home and took in 27 offers. That is a good problem the way a full dance card is a good problem, and it can go badly wrong without a process. This is how I run a multiple offer situation for my sellers in Calvert County, and what I learned from the agent who won that one.
Twenty-seven offers
We listed a home and took in 27 offers.
That sounds like a good problem. It is a good problem the way a full dance card is a good problem — wonderful, and also completely overwhelming if you have not decided in advance how you are going to choose. Twenty-seven contracts is several hundred pages. Every one of them has a price, a settlement date, a financing type, a deposit, an inspection arrangement, and a stack of addenda. Read them cold, one after another, and by number nine they blur together and you start making decisions on whichever one you happened to read when you were still fresh.
A seller with many choices can end up worse off than a seller with three, because too many similar options create doubt, and doubt makes people pick badly or freeze. My job on that listing was not to produce offers. The price and the marketing had already done that. My job was to run a process clean enough that my sellers could actually see what they had.
This is how I do that.
Decide what you want before the offers exist
The worst time to work out what matters to you is at nine o'clock at night with contracts spread across the kitchen table and a deadline in the morning.
So we do it early, on a calm afternoon, before the sign goes in the yard. I sit down with my sellers and we write down more than a price. We write down the earliest settlement date they could survive and the latest one that still works. Whether they need time in the house after closing, and how much. How much repair exposure they are willing to carry. What they would trade, and for what.
Some of those get a target. Some get a floor or a ceiling. The point is that when the offers come in, we are not comparing them to each other and hoping a winner emerges. We are comparing each one to a standard my sellers set themselves, while they were calm and nobody was waiting on them.
That single habit changes how the whole week feels. It turns an emotional decision into a readable one.
Tell buyers what you actually need
"Highest and best" is one of the worst phrases in this business, and we all keep using it.
Highest, a buyer understands. It means price. But best? Best according to whom? Best depends entirely on your situation, and the buyer has no way to know your situation. So they guess. And when twenty-seven people guess, you get twenty-seven offers full of terms nobody actually wanted, and the two or three buyers who would gladly have given you exactly what you needed never find out what that was.
It feels counterintuitive, but telling buyers what matters to you is in your own interest. If you need to stay in the house until the end of June, say so. If you have been burned by a financing failure before and you want a real preapproval, say so. The strong buyers write to it. You get better offers, not fewer, and you get them from the people most able to close.
I put that guidance out with the listing, in writing, to every agent who asks. Same information to everybody, so the process is fair and nobody can claim otherwise. Then the offers that come back are comparable on purpose, which makes the next step enormously easier. There is more on this in what "highest and best" really means.
Set the rules and the clock
A multiple offer process needs a deadline, and everyone needs to know what it is.
On the 27-offer listing my sellers wanted three days. That was their call and it was a good one for their situation — long enough that a serious buyer touring on Saturday could get a lender and an inspector lined up, short enough that the urgency stayed real. A deadline that is too tight punishes the careful buyers, who are usually the ones you want. A deadline that drags lets the whole thing go soft.
Along with the date I tell every agent how the decision will be made: that my sellers reserve the right to choose the offer that is best overall rather than simply the highest, that they may negotiate final terms with whoever they select, and that buyers should assume they get one opportunity to put their best foot forward. Nobody should be waiting for a second call that may never come.
The agent who called every day
Here is the part of that story I tell every buyer's agent who will listen.
During those three days, one agent called or texted me once or twice a day to ask how her offer was doing.
Now, I could not tell her what the other offers were. That is not mine to give away, and my duty runs to my sellers. But what I could do — with my sellers' blessing — was tell her honestly that the terms on another contract were looking more agreeable than hers. Not which contract. Not what was in it. Just that she was not currently in front.
And every time I told her that, she went back and improved her offer.
She won. Out of twenty-seven, she won, because she stayed in contact and kept adjusting while everyone else sat waiting for the phone to ring. She was not the loudest and she was not obnoxious about it. She was simply present, pleasant, and persistent, and she treated the three days as part of the negotiation instead of as a waiting period.
That outcome was good for my sellers too, which is worth saying plainly. Her persistence pulled her offer up. The competition worked the way it is supposed to work, and my sellers ended up with a better contract than they would have had if that agent had gone quiet after hitting send.
What a listing agent can and cannot say
Since I just described telling a buyer's agent she was behind, let me be precise about where that line sits, because sellers ask.
What gets shared in a multiple offer situation is the seller's decision, not the agent's. I do not disclose the contents of one buyer's offer to another buyer. I do not read terms out loud, I do not confirm numbers, and I do not play offers off each other by feeding details back and forth. That would be a breach of what those buyers handed me in confidence, and frankly it would poison the process.
What I will do, when my sellers authorize it, is tell an agent where they stand in general terms so they have a real chance to compete. There is a meaningful difference between "another contract looks more agreeable right now" and "you need to beat $612,000 and waive your appraisal." The first keeps the process honest and competitive. The second sells out the buyer who trusted me with their paperwork.
Ask any listing agent you interview how they handle that. Their answer tells you a great deal about how they will handle your house.
Compare on net, not on the headline
Two offers at the same price are almost never worth the same money.
One asks you to pay $12,000 toward the buyer's closing costs. One includes a home warranty at your expense. One wants a survey you had not budgeted for. One closes three weeks later than you wanted, which is another mortgage payment, another insurance payment, and possibly a second move. The top line on all four can be identical.
So we run every serious offer down to a net figure and put them side by side on one page. Price, minus concessions, minus costs that offer creates, adjusted for timing. Then my sellers are comparing money to money instead of comparing a big number to a slightly smaller number and feeling the pull of the big one.
Then we look at the part the net sheet cannot show: how likely is this one to actually close? A slightly lower offer from a buyer whose file is through underwriting, with a lender I can reach on a Sunday, is frequently worth more than the top number attached to a prequalification letter and an agent I cannot get on the phone. A deal that dies in week three costs you the price, the momentum, and the story your listing now tells the market. See how Calvert County sellers should compare multiple offers.
The seven that arrived out of nowhere
Something else happened on that listing that I think about often.
Seven of the twenty-seven offers landed in my inbox with no warning at all. No call. No text. Nothing that said "I sent you something, please confirm you got it." Just a contract, in the email, from an agent I never heard from.
One of them I did not find for three weeks. It had gone to spam. When I eventually saw it and went back through everything to check whether I had missed a message, there was nothing to find. That agent had never followed up in any form.
Those buyers had a real offer on a house they presumably wanted, and it was never read. They will go on believing they were outbid.
I mention this in a guide for sellers because it cuts two ways. If you are selling, you want a listing agent who confirms receipt of every offer and can account for all of them, because an offer nobody opens is a bidder you never had. And if you are ever on the buying side of one of these, you now know what the difference between agents looks like in practice. I wrote about that from the buyer's side in how I win multiple offers for buyers.
Backups, and the negotiation after you choose
Choosing an offer is not the end of the process. It is the middle.
Once my sellers select a buyer, there is often a short final negotiation — a repair cap, a date adjustment, appraisal protection if the price is aggressive. I keep that quick and reasonable. The buyer who just beat twenty-six other people is motivated, but goodwill is a real asset at this stage and squeezing the last small thing out of somebody can cost you their cooperation for the next sixty days.
I also want a backup offer in place where the second-place buyer is genuinely strong. A signed backup costs the seller nothing and changes the temperature of the whole transaction. If the first deal wobbles at the inspection or the appraisal, you are not relisting a home that now looks like it fell out of contract. You are making one phone call.
And the marketing does not stop the moment we are under contract. Not until the contingencies are behind us.
Where sellers get stuck
The sellers who leave money on the table in a multiple offer situation almost never do it by picking the wrong buyer. They do it earlier, in one of two ways.
They never decided what they actually wanted, so every offer looked like a judgment call instead of a comparison. Or they kept quiet about their needs on the theory that saying less is safer, and got a pile of offers that missed the mark because nobody knew what the mark was.
Both are fixable in an afternoon, before the first showing. That afternoon is the highest-value hour in the entire sale, and it happens before anybody has made you an offer at all.
The competition starts with the price
Nothing in this guide works if the house is priced wrong, so it is worth saying plainly: multiple offers are manufactured long before any offer arrives.
A listing draws the most attention in its first two weeks, because every buyer who has been watching for a home like yours shows up at once. That burst of attention is the raw material. Price sharply into it and those buyers arrive in the same window and see each other in the driveway. Price above it and they trickle in one at a time over two months, each one knowing they are the only person in the room, and you never get a competitive situation at all — you get a negotiation with one buyer who can smell that you have had no others.
That is why I treat pricing as the first move of the negotiation rather than as a separate decision made before it. My full method is in how to price a home in Calvert County.
Preparation does the same work from a different angle. A home that photographs beautifully and shows without excuses converts that attention into offers. A home with deferred maintenance and a hard showing schedule converts it into buyers who move on to the next listing. Twenty-seven offers was not luck. It was a correct price, a well-prepared house and marketing that reached everybody at once.
The offers I look at hardest
Some contracts carry risk that the price never shows, and part of my job is pointing at it before my sellers fall for a big number.
- A prequalification dressed up as an approval. These read almost identically to somebody who does not do this for a living. I call the lender on every serious offer and ask direct questions about where the file actually stands.
- A price the appraisal will not support. An aggressive number with no appraisal protection is a renegotiation scheduled for three weeks from now. If a buyer wants to bid high, I want to see how they intend to handle the gap.
- An open-ended inspection. A wide-open repair request on an older home with a well and septic can turn into a second negotiation you never agreed to have.
- A home sale contingency nobody flagged. Sometimes it is perfectly workable. Sometimes it is a different house in a different county that has not been listed yet, which is not really an offer at all.
None of those automatically disqualify a buyer. Every one of them changes what that offer is worth, and my sellers deserve to know that before they sign, not after.
What 27 offers taught me about my own process
That listing changed how I run these, in two specific ways.
First, I now confirm receipt of every single offer in writing, immediately, without exception. Finding a contract in my spam folder three weeks later was a genuinely uncomfortable moment, even though the failure was not mine. My sellers are entitled to every bidder they actually had, and I am not willing to leave that to an email server.
Second, I stopped treating the deadline as dead air. The agent who won did it by staying in contact, and she was right to. So now I tell buyer agents up front that they are welcome to check in, and that if my sellers authorize it I will tell them in general terms whether they are in front. That makes the process better for everybody. The buyers get a real chance to compete rather than guessing into silence, and my sellers get offers that keep improving instead of a pile that went stale the moment it was submitted.
Both of those came from one listing where the volume was high enough to expose what my process could not handle. That is usually how it works.
Frequently Asked Questions
Decide what matters to you before the offers arrive, then compare each one to that standard rather than to the other offers. Run every serious offer down to a net figure and weigh how likely each buyer is to actually close.
Yes. “Highest and best” tells a buyer nothing about your situation, so they guess. Sharing what you need produces stronger, more targeted offers from the buyers most able to close.
No. The contents of one buyer's offer are not disclosed to another. With the seller's authorization an agent may tell an agent in general terms that they are not currently in front, which keeps competition fair without betraying anyone's terms.
Long enough for careful buyers to line up a lender and inspections, short enough to keep urgency real. Three days worked well on a 27-offer listing and is a reasonable starting point.
No. Two offers at the same price can be worth very different money once concessions, costs and timing are taken out, and a lower offer from a fully underwritten buyer often carries far less risk.
Where the second-place buyer is strong, yes. A signed backup costs nothing and means a failed contract is one phone call rather than a relisting.
There is usually a short final negotiation over items such as a repair cap, a date adjustment or appraisal protection. Keeping it quick and reasonable protects the goodwill you will need for the next sixty days.
Ask. Offers do go missing, including into spam folders, when a buyer's agent never confirms delivery. A listing agent should be able to account for every offer received.
Expecting More Than One Offer?
Let us set your goals and your process before the sign goes in the yard. That afternoon is the highest-value hour in the whole sale.
Dawn Riley
Associate Broker, Realtor, Master Certified Negotiator
The Riley Team at Deep Roots Real Estate
410-414-2438
dawn@dawnriley.net
https://dawnriley.net/