Real estate agents who lie #financialfreedom

7 Aug 2023

Watch on YouTube

A short YouTube monologue (Neel Dhingra, Aug 7, 2023) describing how some real estate agents falsely claim competing offers to pressure buyers. The speaker explains that claiming "other offers" is often used to force quick decisions and higher bids, notes that many state rules prohibit this though gray areas exist (e.g., "expecting" offers), and advises buyers to ask whether offers are actually in hand and to use a trustworthy buyer's agent to verify honesty.

This is going to sound terrible, but I know a few real estate agents who have lied about having another offer. See, when you're making an offer on a property, many times the agent will have other offers, and this will force you to have to act quickly and to pay more for the property. Now, there's a few cases where a real estate agent may lie about having another offer, and per most of the state rules, this is actually not allowed. But there is some gray area. An agent can say that they're expecting other offers, but whether or not they're actually getting them is up for debate. For example, the agent might tell you, hey, I'm expecting two other offers today. But here's how you can call them out. You can ask them, do you actually have these offers in hand? Have you received an actual offer? Normally, they will come clean at this point and say that they don't actually have another offer, but that doesn't mean that other offers aren't coming in. So you have to be careful with this. A good buyer's agent will be able to find out if the listing agent is BSing you or not.