In this segment, Jake Burhans explains his team’s default strategy when a seller is faced with competing offers that are significantly higher than theirs. Rather than inflating their bid to match the highest offer, they choose to be transparent, presenting a realistic number they can actually fulfill and educating the seller about current market activity—showing active and pending listings to illustrate why the higher offers may be unrealistic. This honest approach protects both parties from wasted time, preserves the team’s reputation, and often leads sellers to return after other offers fall through, ultimately resulting in successful deals for Burhans’ team.
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When the seller has other offers that are much higher than ours, our default is always, listen, we're gonna sit here and tell you a number that you probably don't wanna hear. I could tell you the number that you want all day long. We can go under contract and all these things, and I'm gonna waste my time and you're gonna waste your time. 'Cause that's what other people do, and that's what we'll tell the sellers. Everyone's out there telling you what you wanna hear, locking you up, taking you 5 days before the closing date, and dropping the price $50,000, or backing out. We don't wanna do that. That's, that's why we have good ratings. That's why we do good business. So that's always our default with sellers when they have other offers on the table. It's educating them on the market, showing them, hey, this is what's active. This is what's pending. This offer makes legitimately no sense. There's no way that someone could come in and buy this. They're just gonna tell you what you wanna hear. And that might not be advantageous for me to say right in this moment, but it's the truth. I'd rather come in with a lower number that we can actually perform on than just tell you what you wanna hear. Only to waste both of our times a month, 2 months down the line. And a lot of times, people will end up going with other offers and they'll come back to us, they'll be like, "Oh, that guy Jake," or that guy Jared, or whoever. "Yep, they were right, and they were, you know, kind enough to tell me how it was, even though I didn't want to hear it at the time." And we get deals that way.
