The Offer Insights for some places, like the San Francisco Bay Area, are a horror movie: there was an offer for more than $50,000 over the list price of a Foster City townhouse that was still in the bottom five of 26 total offers. An all-cash offer for more than $150,000 over the asking price of an El Cerrito stunner lost out to a buyer who conducted a pre-inspection to be able to take the property as-is.

But there are also hopeful stories too, of buyers in Acton, Massachusetts who won out over four investors by building a relationship with the seller, or a Redfin client who simply beat everyone else to the punch, acting on an Instant Update to tour a cute little Dallas condo within hours of its debut, and then making an offer on the same day; backup offers poured in, but too late. Other customers made pre-emptive offers, coming in ahead of the offer deadline with a mostly cash offer and an easy close that were tough to top.

Whenever we represent a client on an offer to buy a home, we publish data on whether we won, how many competing offers we faced, how long the property was on the market, how much our buyer offered compared to list price and the rough amount of our buyer’s planned down-payment:

This is stuff you could only get before by working for months with a savvy real estate agent, but is now available to everyone Redfin serves, on a much larger number of sales: in areas where Redfin has plenty of agents such as northeast Seattle, Redfin clients have made an offer on 20% of the homes sold in December.

And more than ever, our customers want to know what it takes to win: in January, 69% of the offers we submitted for our clients faced competition, up from 53% a year ago. In the Bay Area alone, 94% of our offers were competitive.

To keep pace with the market, we get you the information fast. Because we capture all the details about an offer via the tools our agents use to prepare that offer in the first place, we can publish the details within seconds of submitting the offer to a listing agent.

Whoa, This is Sensitive Stuff! What About Confidentiality?

To avoid wrecking a deal still in progress, we identify the home only by its neighborhood before the sale closes; we also leave out the Redfin agent’s notes, and provide broader ranges around the price of our client’s offer and other deal details:

Once the deal is done, we ask our own client if we can identify the home on which that client bid. If the client prefers to keep the entire story confidential, we remove the Offer Insight without ever having identified the property it was about. Otherwise, we identify the property and publish more specific details about the offer.

We publish Offer Insights throughout Redfin.com, showing nearby deals when you look at an individual property but also highlighting juicy details about pending sales as you browse our map of listings:

To see a neighborhood’s entire deal history, you can just visit the page for that neighborhood:

And if you want more detail about an Offer Insight, you only have to ask, via an online form associated with each Insight. The Redfin agent who wrote the offer (in this case, Allie Howard) will respond to your questions, usually via email, typically within a few hours:

Offer Insights are not available in Atlanta, Philly and the Washington DC area because we are still awaiting approval from our data providers.

Our Vision: Why Offer Insights Matter

But Offer Insights is more than just a way to guide Redfin customers on how much to pay for a home. It’s part of a strategy based on our unique identity as a real estate broker and a software company. Unlike a pure online real estate company, Redfin employs our own agents in neighborhoods across 20 major American markets, working with thousands of buyers and sellers every month. This allows us to capture real-time information about every neighborhood from local folks on the ground.

And unlike a traditional brokerage, all of our agents use online tools for writing offers that are connected to the website consumers use to shop for homes for sale. This makes it easy to use the Internet to publish the collective wisdom of thousands of agents. The result is a crushing competitive advantage at the point that really matters for an anxious home-buyer, about what it takes to really win.

In March 2011, we first explored the idea of combining our agents’ neighborhood expertise with the vast data Redfin.com stores in the Internet cloud, when we began publishing Tour Insights, our agents’ candid, in-person accounts of the homes we’ve toured:

Since then, Redfin has become a vast repository of proprietary local knowledge, amassing over 250,000 comments about homes with a noisy road nearby or peek-a-boo views no one had noticed before, covering as many as 39% of the homes for sale in our most popular neighborhoods. We now routinely get calls from other agents asking us to publish a Tour Insight on their new listing because these listings get far more Redfin.com and mobile traffic.

With Offer Insights, we hope to deepen the repository of local knowledge we offer our customers. The Internet has been great at organizing and publishing a jumble of numbers and pictures about homes for sale. But it is only now beginning to tell a story, to capture what really just happened around the corner, to convey not merely the data stored by computers but the wisdom of people who have lived and worked in your neighborhood for decades.

This is why Offer Insights isn’t just a feature, it’s a new way for Redfin — and perhaps other companies that combine technology with real-world products or services — to be: big and small, juicy and dry, national and local, data-driven and personal, computer and human.

The post Redfin Publishes Thousands of Real-Time Insights on What It Takes to Win A Bidding War appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Listed by Chris Iverson, Intero Real Estate Services

Small House, Big Bucks in Palo Alto, CA

Beds: 2
Baths: 1
Sq. Ft.: 971
Listed: Mar 27, 2012
Closed: Apr 26, 2012
Days on the Market: 9
Asking Price: $948,000
Final Sales Price: $1,350,000
Sale to List Ratio: 142.4%
# Offers: 12

“My clients came in with a competitive all-cash offer of $970,000, 2.3% above asking,” said Redfin Agent Brad Le, “but we couldn’t compete with the winning all-cash offer 42% above the list price.”

Listed by Jeremy Cunningham, Redfin

Listing Agent Considers Unlisted Phone Number in Springfield, VA

Beds: 3
Baths: 2
Sq. Ft.: 1,559
Listed: Mar 29, 2012
Closed: Apr 30, 2012
Days on the Market: 4
Asking Price: $339,950
Final Sales Price: $381,000
Sale to List Ratio: 112.1%
# Offers: 14

“For the three days after I put this listing on the market, my phone did not stop ringing, and there was a steady line of cars lined up in front of the house,” said Jeremy Cunningham, Redfin Listing Specialist. “The winning offer had essentially no appraisal contingency. We chose it because even though it had VA financing, which requires an appraisal, the buyers agreed to cover any deficit in the event that the appraisal came in low.”

Listed by Simon Kiang, Re/Max

Cash is King, And Time is Money in Sunnyvale, CA

Beds: 4
Baths: 3
Sq. Ft.: 1,933
Listed: Mar 1, 2012
Closed: Mar 21, 2012
Days on the Market: 9
Asking Price: $1,029,888
Final Sales Price: $1,083,000
Sale to List Ratio: 105.2%
# Offers: 6

“My clients made an offer of $1,081,000, almost $60,000 over the asking price, with a 14-day closing, no contingencies, and a 90% down payment,” said Redfin Agent Miawand Bayan. “The seller ended up accepting an all-cash, non-contingent offer with a 7-day closing, with a price only slightly higher than our offer.”

Listed by Loic Pritchett, TTR Sotheby’s International Realty

Burning the Midnight Oil in Washington, DC

Beds: 2
Baths: 2.5
Sq. Ft.: 1,496
Listed: Nov 9, 2011
Closed: Dec 15, 2011
Days on the Market: 7
Asking Price: $649,000
Final Sales Price: $667,000
Sale to List Ratio: 102.8%
# Offers: 6

“My clients, their lender and I were up until 2:30 a.m. negotiating with the sellers and their agent,” said Redfin Agent Stuart Gavan. “We managed to beat out the other offers by reducing our contingency deadlines significantly and offering well above the list price.”

Listed by Erica Johnson, Coldwell Banker

Get Your Offer In First, Then Make Necessary Adjustments in Seattle, WA

Beds: 3
Baths: 2.25
Sq. Ft.: 2,460
Listed: Mar 29, 2012
Closed: Apr 30, 2012
Days on the Market: 1
Asking Price: $587,000
Final Sales Price: $600,000
Sale to List Ratio: 102.2%
# Offers: 4

“Ours was the first offer submitted, and once we found out a second offer had come in, we added an escalation clause,” said Redfin Agent Chad Pluid. “In the end, our offer wasn’t much higher than the competition, but I made sure to respond quickly and honestly to every request the listing agent had, and I think that helped us win out.”

Listed by Nick Chaconas, Redfin

Seller With Cash Stands Out Among the Rest in Washington, DC

Beds: 2
Baths: 2
Sq. Ft.: 1,500
Listed: Feb 3, 2012
Closed: Mar 16, 2012
Days on the Market: 9
Asking Price: $799,900
Final Sales Price: $803,418
Sale to List Ratio: 100.4%
# Offers: 3

“The top two offer contenders were just a few hundred dollars apart and had nearly identical financing,” said Redfin Listing Specialist Nick Chaconas. “We asked both buyers to come back with their best and final offers. The winning bidder quickly turned hers into an all-cash offer above list price with a rent-back period and no contingencies.”

Listed by Irene Bremis, Bremis, James J. Inc.

We Asked What the Seller Wanted, And We Gave It To Him in Somerville, MA

Beds: 5
Baths: 3.5
Sq. Ft.: 3,056
Listed: Mar 20, 2012
Closed: Apr 30, 2012
Days on the Market: 16
Asking Price: $759,900
Final Sales Price: $754,900
Sale to List Ratio: 99.3%
Estimated # Offers: 3

“We won this bidding war not only because my clients’ offer was all cash, but also because we included a Use of Occupancy agreement so that the sellers could close early and move out later,” said Redfin Agent Matt Zborezny. “We ended up negotiating $5,000 off the sales price after the inspection, but the sellers still preferred our all-cash offer so they could use the money toward their own home purchase.”

The post In the Trenches: Behind the Scenes of America's Bidding Wars appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Guest post by Greg Whelan, Redfin Agent serving Chicago’s Near North Side

Deciding It Was Time to Buy

After helping more than two hundred people buy and sell homes during my last decade as a real estate professional, I decided last spring that it was time to become a homeowner myself.  I had been quite content renting my very reasonably priced apartment for the last several years, but I was finally starting to crave more space. After reviewing available rentals, I realized that renting the type of apartment I wanted would cost nearly as much as a monthly mortgage payment on a comparable place.  It was a perfect storm: low interest rates and declining home prices combined to make home ownership an affordable option.  It just felt like right time for me to buy.

Touring and Negotiation Processes

I had my eye on a house in the Ukrainian Village that my friend had lived in a few years ago. It had been pulled from the market as a short sale and was in the process of becoming a foreclosure. When it was finally relisted as a foreclosure in September, I got in to see it right away.  After spending an hour and a half touring the house, I realized it just wasn’t what I remembered it to be. It had been pretty badly beaten up in the foreclosure process and needed new floors and windows among many other repairs. This was a lot more work than I wanted to do, and it made me realize I really wasn’t in the market for a fixer-upper.

I expanded my search a couple neighborhoods up the EL to Logan Square where I found the two-flat (a two story building with separate apartments on each floor) I eventually bought.  After touring the home, I wandered the neighborhood at various times of the day and night, on bike and on the EL. I took the advice I give my clients: I ate at the little café on the corner, walked to the EL, and had a drink at the neighborhood bar to make sure I really liked the location.

I did a Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) and found that the home was significantly overpriced, so I came in with what I deemed to be a fair offer at twenty percent below list price. I justified my offer with comparables, knowing that the seller might take offense at my “lowball” offer. Next ensued a week of fierce back-and-forth negotiations culminating with us agreeing to meet halfway at ten percent off the list price. The process taught me a lot about myself and my role as an agent. I repeatedly found myself becoming angry when the seller wouldn’t respond quickly or agree to my preferred terms (or simply accept my offer). When I’m representing a client, I know that to them, it’s way more than just a deal, but coping with my own feelings gave me a  greater understanding of how important my job is to not only represent my clients in a professional manner, but first and foremost to advocate for them and their feelings.

Inspection

I wish I could report that once we had settled on a price it was smooth sailing. To the contrary, the inspector uncovered several minor items that needed repair and one huge problem: the underground crawl space was not sealed off, leaving the house un-insulated and vulnerable to pest infestation.  For me, this was a deal breaker, but the seller refused to pay the cost of sealing it off.  I threatened to back out of the transaction using the inspection contingency and told the seller I’d be happy to watch the home sit on the market through the winter. The seller backed down and agreed to cover the cost of this major repair, and the deal moved forward to a successful closing.

What I Learned

As a Redfin agent, advocacy has always been a core value of mine, but the emotionally charged process of negotiating on my own behalf instilled in me a much greater appreciation for the fact that my role as an agent is not just to be a cool, calm and, when necessary, fierce negotiator. My most important task is to advocate for my clients to not only get them the best deal possible, but also to get them what they want out of the deal, whether it’s a fair price from which they can’t budge or a repair they can’t live without.

After devoting so much time and energy in helping others become homeowners, I’m proud that I can now call myself one too.  I called my mom as I was pulling into my new garage after closing and said to her, “Coolest thing about buying this place, I got a house for my car!”

Services and Service Providers I Used

Inspector: Larry Robbins
Lender: Erik Johansson
Attorney: Jason Schram
To List Rental Unit: Craigslist
Tenant Screening: TransUnion SmartMove

The post What Would An Agent Do? Long-Time Agent as First-Time Home Buyer appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

To his surprise, Redfin agent, Max Diez negotiated a winning deal that included two years of free HOA dues and walked away with a $12,660 Redfin commission refund. Not bad at all.

If you’re already researching using the Internet and attending open houses on your own time, why pay a traditional buying agent 2-3% when all you need is support during the actual transaction? Redfin delivered exactly the value I needed but at a cost that makes sense. My Redfin agent, Max Diez, and the rest of the Redfin team was very responsive and provided great insight during the offer and escrow process, particularly when it came to the local nuances of buying property in San Francisco. I am a big fan of the way Redfin is transforming the real estate industry and look forward to using them again when I buy and sell property!

-Mark Trang

The floor hasn’t completely fallen on San Francisco real estate but there are deals to be had if you’re looking to take advantage of a boom in new construction building and plenty of cautious buyers sitting on the sidelines. If you have a funny or insightful story for us about how you bought or sold a house, send it to bahn (at) redfin (dot) com; we’ll probably use it, and then we’ll send you a gift certificate for a dinner anywhere you like.

The post War Story: Buying New Brings Sweeter Deal appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Builders with multiple units prefer this approach because they avoid recording a sale at a discount, and listing agents like it better, too. If you have a funny or insightful story for us about how you bought your house, send it to bahn (at) redfin (dot) com; we’ll probably use it, and then we’ll send you a gift certificate for a dinner anywhere you like.

The post Finally, a New War Story appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

In 1998, I traveled to the Boston-area from California to find housing for my wife and I during grad school. On the school’s intranet I found a post by a graduating student who wanted to sell her condo/townhome a few blocks away from campus.

I stopped by the house unannounced,introduced myself and discovered over normal chit chat that the seller was coincidentially moving to our neighborhood in California after graduation, but didn’t yet have housing in the uber-competitive bay area housing market.

I asked about buying the Boston condo (it was perfect for us) hoping for an inside-deal, but the seller wisely said that the Boston market was as frothy as California and that she was planning on simply taking the highest price (and she had already engaged an agent) based on offers received the next day. She had had indications that at least 6 offers were forthcoming.

My wife (who was back in California and hadn’t seen the place) and I quickly determined we wanted the condo, but couldn’t afford a bidding war. Therefore, we made an offer and we included a clause that obligated the buyer (us) to provide the seller 4 months free housing at the buyer’s home in California.

The risk we took is that the seller could’ve been an axe-murderer (we didn’t know her at all other than my “drop-by” meeting the day before) or merely obnoxious as a four-month roommate. We also risked paying a few extra months of our California mortgage before selling, but that was far less than what we would’ve needed to increase our bid to win the deal solely on price.

The seller did in fact get 7 offers, most higher than ours, but we won the bid anyway because the seller was worried about her California housing situation and we solved that for her. And a month later we had a random stranger as a roommate for the entire summer.

Thanks Peter for the excellent story and a great lesson for all of us about how important it can be to make sure you take account of all the factors when you make an offer. Sometimes, there are elements even more important than money when you really want to the seal the deal. For his effort, Peter gets dinner at the restaurant of his choice. Do you want us to buy you dinner? Just share your great offer story with us and, if we post it, we’ll give you $50 towards dinner at your favorite place. Just email it to eric.heller (at) redfin.com.

The post War Story: Sometimes Giving the Seller a Place to Live Seals the Deal appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

It took us two years to find our dream house: enough bedrooms for our family and home office, plus enough yard for my vegetables and my husband Jerry’s dream orchid greenhouse. The house was only on the
market for four days. We visited every day, managing to corner the owner each time and barrage him with questions about the property.

Betsy’s House:

I wrote a lovely letter outlining our hopes for the house and including a picture of our children. When we made a bid, there were eight competing offers. Our agent came back to us and said, “They have two questions for you. One, would you be willing to give them the washer & dryer? And they want you to know that their daughter’s placenta is buried under the apple tree. You just need to know that.”

Jerry and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. We both told our agent: “Our son’s placenta is buried under our fig tree!” Bill grinned and sprinted back to the meeting room. Two seconds later shouts of laughter erupted from the meeting room and he came racing back. “Sign here, sign here, here’s the price, you’ve got the house.”

The sellers sold us the house at $65,000 more than the asking price — but our escalator went up to $87,000 more than the asking price. We could hear the other agent shrieking, “My client will pay more! My
client will pay more!!” (Our strategy was — we had an escalator clause of a very weird number, something like $1,118, and we had a very high (for us) ceiling). The other person was willing to top $487,000, but the seller chose us because of the placenta.

This was a case of absolute karma — the sellers were the kind of people we would have liked to have hung out with. They wanted US to have the house, not because we could pay top dollar, but because we clearly respected the craftsmanship of the house and wanted to treat it with love for the next 30 years.

We’ve been in the house for almost a year and every time I drive up our road, I pray to myself, “Please let our house still be there, please let it still be there.” We love it that much.

Thanks Betsy, for your story and example of how even the obscure can make the difference when it comes to winning the bid on the perfect house. As a thank you, Betsy gets dinner at her favorite restaurant on us. Got a great war story? Send it on to eric (dot) heller (at) redfin (dot) com — we’ll post it up and send you out for dinner as well!

The post War Story: Karma Wins (Not for the Faint of Heart) appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Here Sue’s story, in her own words:
I was at an open house and my realtor could tell that I REALLY wanted the house. So she got the conversation going with the owners. We found out that the current owner and I had run the Chicago Marathon the same year and that she was due to have a baby girl in just two months.
We were to present our offer the next evening as one of 10 offers (!). I told my realtor that I’d rather pay too much for the house than lose it. We debated how far over list price we needed to go to win the bidding war. We decided on a strategy to just go in with a blank check and I went to the store to buy little pink running shoes for the soon-to-be-born baby girl as a sweetener to the deal.
We gave them a signed contract with the amount line left blank and told the sellers to fill in whatever amount it would take to get the house. I was a bit nervous, but my realtor’s lawyer assured us that they couldn’t put in a ridiculous amount without my consent. So we waited at a nearby restaurant for them to review the other offers and let us know the outcome. Oh, and my realtor presented the little pink running shoes to the delight of the soon-to-be-parents.

Here’s a picture of the house:

We got a call at the end of the presentations asking what our offer would be. We offered well above the highest offer, but also well below what I was willing to pay. Thinking we had it wrapped up, we paid the check and walked down to the real estate office. We waited some tense moments in the parking lot, eyeing suspiciously any cars that looked like they might be pulling into the parking lot to steal away “my” house. We got another call saying that the other buyer matched my offer and could I do anything to make the decision easier for them. We threw in another $5k and went back to waiting for the final call.
We got the call that I’d won the bidding war. The strategy of the seller setting the price low to prompt a bidding war seemed to work in my favor–the buyers who could go as high as I could didn’t bother to check out the house because at the list price, in my neighborhood, one would assume the house must be a fixer. And the folks who did look at it evidently couldn’t (or wouldn’t) pay what I did. I’ve been in the house for 3 years and cheer every time I see data that indicates the house has appreciated significantly. I feel very lucky…

Thanks Sue, for your excellent story and lesson on persistence when it comes to finding hidden jewels in this crazy housing market. As a thank you, Sue gets dinner for two at the Dahlia Lounge on us. Got a great war story? Send it on to eric (dot) heller (at) redfin (dot) com — we’ll post it up and send you out for dinner to your favorite restaurant!

The post War Story: A Blank Check is a Powerful Argument appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

The clever, under-stated Clay Nielsen was the first to answer Redfin’s call for “war stories,” tales of intrigue and derring-do to give Redfin shoppers an angle on winning deals. This one is *good*.

Here’s Clay story, in his own words:
In May of 2005, my wife and I decided it was time to start looking for a larger house for our growing family. We knew the neighborhood that we wanted to be in, but were having a hard time finding something that was just right. We finally stumbled upon an old “tear down” on a very large lot that would enable us to build a new house that truly fit our needs. We knew that this opportunity would generate competition so, to win our Madison Park house, we submitted an unusual offer at the offer deadline with these terms:

If you really want to win without committing to a price until you see the price, and without getting into a bidding war or even really a negotiation, you might to try a no-haggle option like this.

For sharing such a great tactic, Clay gets dinner for two at El Gaucho (his choice). Got a great war story? Send it on to glenn (dot) kelman (at) redfin (dot) com — we’ll post it up and send you out for dinner to your favorite restaurant!

The post War Story: Using Options to Buy a House appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.