6 Things Listing Agents Hate about Multiple Offers (And What You Can Do to Help Them as a Seller)

You can imagine that buyers’ agents don’t love a good old-fashioned bidding war on a house their buyer wants. But you might be surprised to learn that even listing agents don’t love dealing with them either. Well, to be fair, it’s more of a love / hate kind of thing.

They love generating multiple offers for their sellers to choose from, and ultimately getting them the highest price and best terms possible. But they hate dealing with some of the things that come along with getting those results.

When you’re selling your house and are fortunate enough to have multiple offers to choose from, it helps to understand what your listing agent is going through when dealing with multiple offers. So let’s take a look at 6 things they hate about dealing with them:

1) Getting grief for selling it so quickly…

Most sellers would prefer not to have their house on the market for months, wondering if an offer will ever come in. Yet some actually get upset when it doesn’t take long enough, in their opinion. It’s like they feel they’re not getting their money’s worth from their agent if it doesn’t take longer to sell. But the reality is, it’s often more time and work for a listing agent to handle — just in a much more condensed period of time — than if a house took months to sell, and only one offer ever came in.

If your listing agent is able to generate multiple offers for you, and get your home under contract in a matter of days, be thankful and appreciate what it took for them to know how to create the situation in the first place, and the work it took to manage the hectic process!

2) It’s hard to keep track of the different offers…

There’s a lot to review and make sure that all the “i’s” are dotted and “t’s” are crossed when dealing with just one offer, but when you have several, making sure each one has everything required is even more difficult. Even the most organized agent can struggle to keep up with the onslaught of offers filling their inbox. And unfortunately, many of them come in missing required disclosures, pages, or signatures, so the agent has to hound the buyers’ agents to get them whatever is missing.

When your agent whips out a spreadsheet or doc with the pros and cons of each offer that came in, appreciate how much time and effort it took for them to keep track of every offer that came in, and organize them in a way for you to review and choose the best of the bunch!

3) Hoping the seller will choose the best offer…

Your agent can give you their perspective and advice based upon their experience, but they can’t outright tell you which offer to choose. Ultimately it’s up to you. And a lot of times, the most tempting offer isn’t actually the best, most solid offer. Agents know what to look and listen for beyond the money. The terms, conditions, the buyers’ qualifications, and even the buyers’ agents they’ll have to work with are all considered when giving you their advice. And all they can do is hope you pick the one that’ll stick and get to closing.

Whichever offer (or offers) your agent suggests are the best ones, try to trust their judgment, even if another one is more tempting to accept.

4) They don’t look forward to delivering bad news…

There’s only one call that’s fun to make once the seller decides which offer to accept. The rest is just delivering heartache to a bunch of people who had their heart set on your house. It doesn’t matter what type of personality your agent has, nobody likes being the bearer of bad news.

Not much you can do to take the sting out of this part of the process, but just letting them know you get it and feel their pain will go a long way with your agent!

5) Making those calls will take a lot of time…

Not only is it hard to break the bad news, it takes a lot more time than you might think to do so! Some buyers’ agents will be fine with a quick call and just accept that their client’s offer wasn’t accepted. But others will want details about why, and possibly even try to convince your agent to reconsider. And sometimes it’s just a matter of being polite, sensitive, and diplomatic with all of the other agents because they don’t want to upset a single one of them, just in case they need to go back to them as a back-up offer if your deal falls through for some reason. Plus, they have to deal with the other agents in the future!

Again, not much you can do to help ease the pain on this one, other than offer some thanks and appreciation for what they have to do!

6) They stress about the appraisal

Worrying about a house you sell appraising for as much as it was sold for is nerve-wracking on any sale. But when you create enough buzz to generate multiple offers, there’s always a chance that the price was bid up beyond what the recent sales data supports. Your listing agent will be prepared to defend the amount they got for you, but they’ll still be bracing themselves for the appraisal to come back lower than the buyer offered.

Once more, this just requires your understanding and appreciation, but saying a few prayers or throwing some coins in the wishing well wouldn’t hurt either!