How to Offer Under Asking Without Offending the Seller

By Sonit Seth

As a real estate professional and entrepreneur, Sonit provides his clients with comprehensive real estate services, including buying and selling properties.

Hi, I’m Sonit Seth with the Seth Edge Group, your edge in real estate.

You’ve found a home you love. The price feels high. And you’d like to come in under asking without insulting the seller and killing the deal before it even starts.

This comes up constantly right now, and for good reason. Houston inventory has been growing, homes are sitting longer than they used to, and buyers can feel that there’s room to move. In a lot of cases, there is. But how you ask matters just as much as the number you put on the offer.

Here’s what actually decides whether that offer gets a conversation or a flat no.

1. Sellers don’t get offended by low numbers. They get offended by arbitrary ones. This is the part most buyers have backwards. If you come in $30,000 under asking and your explanation is “that’s my budget,” the seller hears disrespect, because you’ve told them their home is worth less without giving them a single reason to believe it. Now change the input. Show them three comparable homes that sold for less.

Point out that the roof is at the end of its life, or that the systems are dated. Demonstrate that your number came from what the market is actually doing. That’s an entirely different conversation. Data removes the emotion. It turns a lowball offer into a logical one.

2. If you’re asking for a lower price, strengthen everything around it. Price is one term in an offer, not the whole offer. When you ask a seller to come down, give them something back. A larger earnest money deposit tells them you’re serious. A closing timeline built around their schedule makes their own move easier. Getting fully pre-approved rather than pre-qualified tells them this deal is going to close.

Sometimes a clean, simple offer with fewer contingencies at a lower price beats a full-price offer loaded with conditions, because sellers care about certainty every bit as much as they care about the number.

3. Let your agent present it properly. A good agent doesn’t just fire a number into an inbox. They call the listing agent, walk through the reasoning, and frame the offer as the opening of a real conversation rather than a verdict. That agent-to-agent call is where deals get saved. It’s the difference between a seller reading your number and saying “absolutely not” and a seller saying “let’s see if we can make this work.”

The three together do far more than any one of them does alone. Earlier this year I had a buyer get more than $300,000 off the asking price using exactly this approach. Implemented properly, the discount can be significant.

An offer under asking doesn’t have to be offensive. It just has to be smart.

If you’re buying in Houston, Sugar Land, or the surrounding areas and you want help putting together an offer that gets taken seriously, reach out. Call or text me at 713-252-3670, email me at sonit@sethedge.com, or visit sethedge.com. I’ll make sure your offer tells the right story.