Bidding
"We negotiated down. The house sold for €250,000 more." The story of one deal.
The real story of one deal: our client negotiated down from €2,750,000 — and the house sold to someone else for €3,000,000 in the meantime. On why there's no such thing as "the right price," and how an agent makes decisions without knowing the future.
Clients sometimes ask me: “Can we try offering less?”
Of course we can. And sometimes that’s genuinely the right strategy. But there’s one story I come back to often.
Not long ago we were helping a client buy a house listed at €2,750,000. It was a genuinely good property.
As always, we started with analysis, not emotion. We looked at comparable sales. Studied the market. Talked through the property’s strengths and weaknesses. And concluded there was room to negotiate.
We started negotiating. That’s completely normal work for an agent — not every house sells at the asking price, not every seller gets what they want, and that’s exactly why negotiations exist.
But then something happened that no one could have predicted. While we were still discussing terms, another buyer appeared. Within a few days, the house was sold.
For €3,000,000.
A €250,000 overbid.
”Maybe we should have just offered more up front?”
When we found out the final price, my client looked at me and asked exactly that.
It’s a very fair question. And my answer was: “No. Not at that point.”
Because our job is to make decisions with the facts we have in the moment — not in hindsight. It’s very easy to be a genius once you know the outcome. It’s a lot harder to make the right call while the future is still unknown.
Does that mean we got it wrong?
No.
Could we have known in advance that someone would show up willing to pay €250,000 more? Also no.
That’s exactly why you can’t compare property to an ordinary shop. Every house has its own value — but there’s also a human factor. Sometimes a buyer turns up who says: “This is the exact house I’ve been looking for, and I’ll pay whatever it takes.” At that point, market value stops being the main reference point. Emotion wins.
Does that mean you should always offer the maximum, then?
No.
I could tell just as many stories where the exact opposite happened. Where we negotiated calmly, brought the price down, secured better terms — or talked a client out of buying altogether because the risks were too high.
Every deal is its own story. That’s exactly why I never advise clients to copy someone else’s strategy. What worked yesterday can fall flat tomorrow. Today calls for negotiating; tomorrow, for moving fast; the day after, the best move might be not to make an offer at all.
In real estate, there’s almost never a universal recipe.
There’s no such thing as “the right price”
There’s one thought I repeat to almost every client: there’s no such thing as “the right price.”
There’s only the price this particular buyer is willing to pay for this particular house. Sometimes it comes in below the seller’s expectations. Sometimes it matches them. And sometimes it exceeds them by hundreds of thousands of euros.
A good agent isn’t there to always get you the lowest price
That’s simply not possible. Even the most experienced professional can’t predict when a buyer will fall in love with a house and stop counting the cost.
A good agent is there for something else: to assess the real odds, read the mood of the market, choose the right strategy for this particular deal — and to make sure that once it’s done, you can honestly tell yourself: “We made the best decision we could have, given what we knew at the time.”
Because that’s how good decisions actually get made. Not by the outcome. By the quality of the analysis.
And that, I think, is the hardest part of this profession.