Amid bidding war, one buyer offered $50K for the other to walk away

With so few homes available to buy on the market, some buyers are going to new extremes, resorting even to bribing other buyers to withdraw their competing bid so their own will be accepted.

Buyers are using such desperate tactics because they may feel there’s no other way. Real estate agents in Dallas report submitting multiple bids over asking price on the few available homes there are to buy, yet regularly hear nothing back.

One real estate pro in the city shared with the local ABC-TV channel, WFAA, that a buyer recently tried to scupper a deal he was working on. Todd Tramonte, a real estate professional at Dallas Home Realty, related how he selling a home for a homeowner that had a buyer under contract. Suddenly he received a call from another interested party was said he was willing to offer 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 the 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 had previously made headlines last year when he revealed that some of his buyers were offering up cruise trips to sellers to entice them to choose their offer in bidding wars.

Markets are seeing fierce competition among home buyers, and Dallas has become notorious for it. Courtney Michalek, a real estate pro in Dallas with Iconic Real Estate, told WFAA that 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 in a competitive offer situation 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.