Buyer A to Buyer B: ‘Here’s $50K to Walk Away’
Buyer competition can get heated. In a legally dicey move, a Dallas-area buyer offered a second buyer with a home under contract $50K to cancel the transaction.
DALLAS – Housing inventories are tight, and desperate buyers are going to desperate extremes.
Homebuyers continue to submit offers well above asking price and waive appraisals or inspections to try to win a bidding war, but some buyers take it to the next level, including paying a buyer to walk away from the home they have under contract.
A real estate pro says a buyer recently tried to do just that on a deal he was working on. Todd Tramonte, a real estate professional in Dallas, was selling a home for a homeowner that had a buyer under contract. But another buyer then swooped in and offered the original buyer up to $50,000 to walk away from the property and contract.
“They said they would give them $50K to go away so they could buy the house,” Tramonte told a local news channel. “The buyer turned down the offer – and there’s some complexity as to if someone can legally or ethically do that – but that’s a real story … it happened.”
Tramonte also made headlines last year when his buyers offered cruise trips to sellers to entice them to choose their offer in bidding wars.
Markets are seeing fierce competition among homebuyers, and Dallas has become notorious for it. Courtney Michalek, a real estate pro in Dallas with Iconic Real Estate, says she submitted at least seven offers over the past week that were all over asking price. Yet, her buyers still hadn’t heard back.
“It’s absolutely wild,” Michalek says. “I have to reach out again and again just to get an acknowledgment of an offer that’s $50,000 above the asking price.”
To win in a bidding war, buyers who offered an all-cash transaction were four times more likely to win a competitive offer than those who didn’t in 2021, according to a newly released report from Redfin. All-cash offers were found to be significantly more successful than other strategies, such as waiving the financing contingency or a pre-inspection.
Source: “How Crazy Is the Dallas Real Estate Market Right Now? A Buyer Was Offered $50K to Walk Away From Home They Just Secured,” ABC-8/WFAA.com (March 15, 2022)
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