How One Agent Managed 86 Offers on a House

“The attorney’s office said this set the record for the highest amount of offers they’ve ever seen on one house,” says Lisa Harris.

An agent with RE/MAX Center in Georgia, Harris has seen an influx of inventory in the past month in the Greater Atlanta housing market. One home, however, tops all others when it comes to representing the recent increased demand for housing – leading to an epic tangle of bidding wars.

After people spent a slow springtime indoors reconsidering the functionality of their living spaces, the summer selling season launched with low inventory and anxious buyers willing to pay competitive prices. At the moment, demand remains high – enough to set records.

Recently, Atlanta’s limited supply of homes for sale played a part in one of Harris’ listings receiving 86 total offers over a three-day span. Like the closing attorney, Harris had never dealt with this many interested buyers on one property.

Listing the suburban home

In late June, Harris began working with a client to sell a home in Duluth – a suburb 27 miles northeast of Atlanta. The client was a man from Michigan selling his late sister’s property from across the country. While helping manage his sister’s assets, a local law office referred him to Harris to handle selling the house.

His sister’s house was humble. While located in a popular neighborhood and sitting on a spacious lot, the 1980s brick house is a diamond in the rough and could use a bit of updating, according to Harris. Despite repair factors like still having its original roof, the home was one-of-a-kind in an area where a house selling for under $200,000 is hard to come by. A listing price of $150,000 made this property uniquely desirable to investors and first-time homebuyers alike.

Before hitting the market, the client hired an estate sale coordinator to clear out the interior of the home. The estate sale was scheduled to take place over the weekend and, following professional photos being taken, Harris was set to list the home that following Wednesday.

But word of a delay from the photographer made Harris antsy. She advised the seller to list the home that same day and she began promoting it across her social media channels, mess and all.

“I just started making videos. I was really promoting the estate sale, telling people to come check it out – but that was great promotion for the house itself. The estate sale manager was promoting it on social media, the client in Michigan was promoting it on social media and [the lawyer] who connected us all was sharing my videos on social media, so we had everybody working together,” Harris explains.

When she arrived at the house on Saturday afternoon, cars lined the streets in the neighborhood. The estate sale manager explained that every car was there to explore the estate sale or scope out the property which would soon be for sale.

In a matter of hours, the people of Duluth were buzzing over the home.

“By 10 o’clock the next morning, [the client and I] realized this was not going to be anything normal. My voicemail was full by 9 a.m. from both agents and buyers. Some callers were leaving four to five voicemails,” Harris says.

Closing the sale

Offers flooded into Harris’s inbox by the minute. To even begin narrowing them down, she and the client decided on a “highest and best” deadline, giving the most serious buyers two days to put their best offers on the table. And, navigating the process from out of state, the client was set on finding a cash offer with a timely due diligence period.

Accounting for re-writes following the highest and best deadline, the total amount of offers technically exceeded 125.

After combing through every final offer and spending hours grappling on the phone, they settled on an efficient cash buyer offering $30,000 over asking price and closed the deal immediately following the final deadline.

Looking back just weeks later, she recounts that the biggest takeaway from the experience was how powerful the impact of social media marketing was.

“There is a huge opportunity to work with other people in our industry, like the gentleman who was running the estate sale. When I started to film videos of the home and he started sharing them on social media, we saw the success of co-promotional marketing. Now, when he gets new business, he’s also promoting me – and vice versa,” she says.

Given the success of this unique situation, Harris and the estate sale manager have since teamed up for two more estate sales together.