How could our full-price offer be rejected?
We saw a home we liked and put in a full-price offer with only one small stipulation asking the seller to re-paint a bedroom. The seller now wants us to up our bid. Isn’t the seller required to accept our full-price offer?
Answer: You may have made a full-price bid, but you did not accept the seller’s offer.
The seller offered the property for sale at a given price, say $400,000. You are willing to pay $400,000 but want some minor repair work included in the deal. The catch is that an offer includes both price and terms. You have asked for a term not offered by the seller, the bedroom repairs, and — in effect — rejected the original offer and made a counter-offer which the sellers can now accept or reject.
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Comment by nadean pedersen on 17 February 2009:
This implies that if the buyer had not attached a stipulation to their full-price offer (thus turning it into a counter-offer), their full-price “offer” would have constituted acceptance of the seller’s offer price. Then is the seller obligated to sell to buyer at that price since it appears a contract has been made?
Comment by Peter G. Miller on 17 February 2009:
There is an unusual aspect of real estate selling.
What’s really happening is this: A seller is saying I’d like someone to make an offer for my property at or above a given price. A buyer then presents an offer with lots of terms and conditions — NOT the seller. In other words, it is actually the buyer who makes the offer. Thus there is no seller offer to accept, just a testing of the marketplace.