Housing market is crazy and my family is relocating for work. I needed a place asap and first I believe we got super lucky and second this realtor knows 100x more on how write a winning offer than the previous 3 realtors I had used on my purchases.

- With houses going that are listed in our price range we found that they were routinely going $100,000 - $150,000 over asking price which there is no way we’d be able to do that. So we looked at houses that were listed about 100k less than what the top of our range was.

- we used a $11,500 escalator. Our realtor was fine with us doing whatever we wanted on the offer but he was honest in saying that there is a slim chance we get the house with certain offers. We found that almost everyone does a $5000 escalator in the area and that $10,000 is really competitive in this certain while $15,000 wasn’t needed unless we were closer to Seattle. We chose $11,500 as everyone goes up by $5000s. So we were instructed to do like a 6,7,8,9,11,12k etc do differentiate ourselves

- on top of a few things my realtor was on top of selling realtor constantly. We new when offers were going to be reviewed and let the sellers know we had an offer coming. He also got a commitment that if the sellers were ready yo accept an offer to let us know as we had the offer ready. He called daily checking in how many offers there were and was able to get out hints as to where the offer was

There were a couple of different things we learned that many in the market were doing to win an offer and we had to be much more aggressive than our offers on previous houses. Find a realtor that knows how to make strong offers in the are that isn’t just a cousin or friend.
All of my previous realtors I felt didn’t do much and I could have done just as much as they did.

Sorry for novel.