Is It a Better Offer?

A seller gets an offer. The house is listed at $515,000. The buyer comes in at $505,000.

The seller looks at the first page of the contract and sees one thing:

"They're $10,000 under asking."

That matters. Of course it does. But it is only the beginning of the conversation.

When I review an offer with a seller, I want to know what that offer is actually expected to put in their pocket, what the buyer is asking the seller to pay, how long the transaction is expected to take, and what happens financially if we turn it down and wait for another buyer.

Because "I want a better offer" raises a pretty important question.

How much better does it actually need to be?

Start with the estimated net, not just the purchase price

One of the first things I prepare when an offer comes in is an estimated seller net sheet.

It is not a crystal ball. Inspection negotiations have not happened yet. We do not know whether the buyer will submit a BINSR requesting repairs, whether the parties will negotiate a credit in lieu of repairs, or whether some other expense will surface before closing.

What the net sheet can do is give the seller a much better picture of the big financial pieces we already know. That can include the purchase price, mortgage payoff, seller-paid buyer-broker compensation, buyer closing-cost concessions, brokerage compensation, title and escrow expenses, property-tax prorations, and known HOA-related costs.

If there is an HOA, those expenses may include more than monthly dues. Depending on the association and the transaction, there can be prepaid or prorated dues, CAP fees, impact fees, resale or transfer charges, and other association-specific costs.

Then there are the terms contained in the offer itself.

In the offers I am seeing, buyers are still frequently requesting 2% to 3% in seller-paid buyer-broker compensation. That is my own experience in current transactions, not an ARMLS market-wide statistic. ARMLS does not provide a separate searchable buyer-broker compensation field in the data I pulled for this analysis.

That distinction matters because a $515,000 offer with substantial seller-paid expenses may produce a different estimated net than a $505,000 offer with cleaner financial terms. The biggest number on the contract is not automatically the biggest number at closing.

Seller concessions are common in this part of the market

I pulled September 2026 ARMLS data for Maricopa County single-family homes that closed between $400,000 and $749,999. There were 1,989 closed sales in that group.

Of those, 63.2% included a seller concession of at least $1. When the concession was reported as a dollar amount, the median was $10,000. When it was reported as a percentage, the median was 2.5%. ARMLS stores those two formats separately, so I am not combining them into one pretend statistic just because spreadsheets enjoy making our lives difficult.

The concession share also varied by price range. From $400,000 to $499,999, 69.3% of closed sales included a concession. From $500,000 to $549,999, it was 62.7%. From $550,000 to $749,999, it was 56.0%.

That does not mean every seller should automatically agree to a concession. It does mean concessions are part of the current negotiating landscape, and they belong in the conversation when we compare offers.

Which asking price?

Here is another number sellers should understand. For those same 1,989 September closings, the median original list price was $530,000. The median final list price was $515,000. The median sale price was $509,990.

The median home sold for 99.14% of its final list price, but only 97.39% of its original list price. Median cumulative days on market was 56.

That difference matters. A seller can eventually sell very close to "asking price" after the asking price has changed.

In fact, the ARMLS statistics show 1,100 of these 1,989 sales had a difference between original and final list price. I separately cross-checked how Flexmls counts that field before using it here. It includes price increases as well as reductions, although the median change was negative in every price band I reviewed.

So when a seller says, "I would rather wait and get my price," I think it is worth asking: Which price? The original price? The current price? The eventual price after another month or two on the market? Those can be three different numbers.

Waiting is not passive

This is the part people tend to overlook. While the seller waits, the market keeps moving.

New homes come on the market. Buyers get new choices. Some of those properties may be priced more aggressively. Some may have newer kitchens, newer HVAC systems, pools, better lots, fewer obvious projects, or sellers with different motivations. Your listing does not get to freeze the competitive set while you wait for somebody to love it more.

On the morning of October 3, there were 7,407 active Maricopa County single-family listings between $400,000 and $749,999 in the ARMLS snapshot I pulled. About one-third had been on the market 30 cumulative days or less. Another 20.6% were between 31 and 60 days. But 46.0% had accumulated more than 60 days on market, and 32.1% were over 90 days.

That is a lot of competition at different stages of its listing life.

And there is a human side to market time that does not fit neatly into a spreadsheet. In my experience, once a home gets somewhere around 45 days on market, buyers start asking: "What's wrong with it?"

Sometimes the answer is absolutely nothing. The home may have launched at an awkward time. It may have started too high. A buyer may have canceled. Showing access may have been difficult. The right buyer may simply not have found it yet. But buyers looking at the listing do not know the whole history when they first see it. They see the days on market, and that can affect how they approach the property and how aggressively they negotiate.

What the September sales show about market time

The ARMLS data does not prove that longer market time causes a lower sale price. Homes that take longer to sell may differ in condition, location, pricing strategy, updates, seller motivation, or a dozen other ways. But there is a pattern worth paying attention to.

For September closings in this $400,000 to $749,999 range, average sale price compared with original list price looked like this:

Again, that is a relationship in the sales data. It is not a promise about what will happen to one particular home. But it gives us some useful context before we casually decide that waiting has no cost.

And then there are the actual carrying costs

Suppose the seller rejects today's offer and the next acceptable offer comes a month later. That does not necessarily mean the seller closes one month later. The next buyer may need another 30 days to finance and close. Now the first closing date and the second closing date may be separated by 60 days.

What does owning the house for those extra 60 days actually cost this seller? That answer should come from their real expenses:

• Mortgage interest, rather than simply treating the entire mortgage payment as a lost expense.
• Property taxes.
• Insurance.
• HOA dues.
• APS or SRP.
• Water.
• Pool service.
• Landscaping.
• Pest control.
• Vacant-property maintenance.

Maybe the seller has already moved and is now carrying two homes. Those numbers are different for every property and every seller. That is why I would rather use the seller's actual bills than plug some generic Phoenix monthly carrying-cost number into a calculator and pretend we have achieved science.

So what does the next offer need to do?

This is the calculation I want the seller to understand. We have an estimated net from Offer A today. If we turn it down, Offer B later needs to produce enough additional value to cover the extra costs of waiting and still leave the seller ahead.

Maybe Offer B has a higher purchase price. Maybe it also asks for more seller concessions. Maybe it asks for 3% toward buyer-broker compensation. Maybe it takes longer to close. Maybe it has cleaner terms. Maybe it has stronger financing. Maybe it fits the seller's timing better.

"Better" is not one line on the contract. It is the entire package.

The net sheet is still an estimate

I want to stress this because real estate transactions have an irritating habit of continuing to happen after we make the first spreadsheet. The initial seller net sheet cannot predict the inspection period. The buyer may submit a BINSR asking for repairs. The parties may negotiate some of those repairs, a credit in lieu of repairs, or another resolution.

Payoff figures can change. Tax prorations can change. HOA charges can change. Other transaction expenses may appear. The purpose of the initial net sheet is not to predict the final penny. It gives the seller a reasonable big-picture estimate using the information we actually have when the offer arrives. That is a much better basis for a decision than comparing two purchase prices in isolation.

Buyers can use this thinking, too

This is primarily a seller decision, but buyers and buyer's agents can learn something from it. When you write an offer, think about how the seller is going to evaluate the package. Purchase price matters. So do seller-paid costs, financing, closing timeline, earnest money, contingencies, appraisal terms, and the other pieces that affect the seller's money, time, and risk.

A buyer does not necessarily need to throw more money at the purchase price to make an offer more attractive. Sometimes the structure of the offer tells a clearer story, and sellers should be comparing those stories side by side.

You may decide waiting is worth it

Sometimes it absolutely will be. A seller may look at today's estimated net, the carrying costs, the current competition, and the market data and decide they are comfortable holding out for something better. That is a perfectly legitimate decision.

But now we have defined what "better" means. What does today's offer put in your pocket? What is the buyer asking you to pay? What will it cost you to keep the house? What does the current Maricopa County market look like? And what does the next offer need to deliver for waiting to actually pay off?

Those are the questions I want answered before we turn down the offer we have for the offer we hope might be coming.

Because hope is useful. It just shouldn't be the only number on the net sheet.

Source

ARMLS through Flexmls, accessed October 3, 2026. Closed-sale statistics include Maricopa County single-family residences with a close of escrow date from September 1 through September 30, 2026, and a sold price from $400,000 through $749,999. Active-listing statistics reflect an October 3, 2026 snapshot of Maricopa County single-family residences listed from $400,000 through $749,999. Market statistics can change as listings are updated or late closings are reported. Information should be independently verified and is not guaranteed by ARMLS.

DeDe Forwood, REALTOR® | HomeSmart

Helping buyers and sellers navigate the Valley of the Sun with honesty, patience, and zero manufactured urgency.