In a nutshell:
Your first offer should be your best offer that's high enough to include you in the round of counter-offers.
Finding the right price:
If your offer is too low, it won’t merit consideration and may even insult the seller. If it’s too high, you may incur more debt than you expected.
Considerations:
- Look at factors surrounding the listing. If it's been around for a long time, there are likely few competing buyers.
- Find out the average sale price of similar homes in the area, and whether they close at asking price or above.
- The best way to create a price estimate for a home is to look at recent, similar & nearby home sales. These are called comps (short for comparable sales). The Open Listings comps tool makes it simple to price any listing.
Budget:
To see what impact an increase in your offer will have on your monthly payments, run the numbers through an online mortgage calculator.
- On a typical 30-year mortgage for a $500,000 house financed at 3.9%, if you increase your offer by $10,000 it adds only $48 a month to your mortgage payment.
- In a healthy budget, a mortgage payment should not consume more than 28% of the homeowner’s gross income.