One of the items that was recently added to the California Association of Realtors purchase contract was a “rejection of offer” box at the end of the contract. The box states that, “no counter offer is being made to the buyer but it was reviewed and rejected by the seller.” My guess is the intention behind this was to give assurance to the buyer that their “low” offer was at least presented.

One of my fellow associates just received the aforementioned “rejection of offer” checked on one of his offers yesterday. The seller just reduced the price $20,000 to an asking price around $255,000, and the offer was approximately $20,000 below that.

Now I certainly understand that some offers are completely absurd (I cannot tell you exactly when the absurdity realm is reached) and may not even deserve the rejection response. But, in many cases, especially now given the normalizing market we are experiencing, some negotiation in going to have to take place on the sellers part. Even if a seller just reduced the price a week before, most buyers are not going to come in very close to full price today. This is not to say that all sellers need to sell for less than they want to. Every seller will have their own motivation & personal factors that make up their decision.

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I can think of a few excuses why I stopped writing posts over the last couple months (too busy, holidays, & not enough topics) but the real reason is lack of commitment to blogging.  I don’t think I am the only one who has done this.  I have noticed a few other people, including some real estate agents, who have started a blog only to stop writing posts a few weeks into it.  From what I can tell, blogging, like exercising & dieting, requires dedication and discipline to be successful at it.  It is my hope that by putting this out there, I will be more committed and held accountable to doing this.

Over the last few weeks, I have been visiting several of the well known real estate blogs to get some ideas and see how these people are doing it.  Some of these sites include Zillow’s Blog, Rain City Guide, The Real Estate Tomato, Real Central VA, & Bloodhound Blog, just to name a few of them. 

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