Cliff Barron here with my update for Milton, Georgetown and Glen Williams for the week of September 20th to the 26th, 2020. Before I get there, I'd like to talk a little bit about multiple offers and bully offers. 

First of all, what is a bully offer? Basically, what happens is a property is listed and the theory behind the listing price is: we're listing it aggressively - in other words, a little bit lower.  This promotes multiple offers and gets a lot more traffic through the property instead of listing it higher (like we used to do traditionally)  and then sell it for 97% of asking. Now, it's fashionable (or it's actually prudent right now) to list a bit lower and try and get the agents to bid against each other - to bid up the price. 

So, what's a bully offer? I'm going to go through the positives and the negatives. Say a property is listed on Monday and it says, "no offers until Sunday at 7:00 pm.  An agent shows it Tuesday morning and then Tuesday afternoon they come in with an offer that is good til midnight. Basically, what they're trying to do is coax the seller and the seller's agent to accept that offer and block out everybody else that's potentially going to see it through the week. The negative of that is that there are a lot of agents that will see that there are no offers until Sunday, so they'll let their clients know there's no huge rush to get through because offers are on Sunday. So, let's take our time, get through the next few days and then if we're interested, we'll put an offer on Sunday night. 

But what happens with a bully offer?  If a bully offer comes in, some agents and some sellers will get so excited that they've got an offer that they'll immediately want to negotiate it, instead of losing it.  They think to themselves, "I'm gonna lose the commission" or from the seller's point of view, they're nervous and they're thinking, "Boy, what happens if we don't get anything else?"  If their agent isn't really up to speed, they might say, "Yeah, we've to to negotiate this offer." Meanwhile, from a seller's point of view and the agent's point of view, you have to look at the number of showings you have listed and coming up and you have to look at the number of properties that have sold in your criteria recently. You have to think of the potential of something in the next five days coming up that's going to significantly decrease your traffic. If you have 30, 40 showings booked for a week, then why the heck would you take a bully offer? Unless... 

Now here's the positive of a bully offer:  sometimes a bully offer is good for the sellers because occasionally, the buyer will think it's going to go over asking with multiple offers and they'll come in with a ridiculously high number. I did a deal in Hamilton recently where I had a showing and next thing you know that day a bully offer came in and they came in so high it was $180,000 over the asking price - in Hamilton! And both myself and my clients looked at each other and we were like, "Wow, that's just crazy." So in that case, the seller and agent made a prudent move by accepting the offer.  This is rare though. Most of the time, you'll sell for less - that's most of the time. And most of the time you're going to lose out on potential buyers that you don't even know are ready to book because they haven't booked yet due to the offer date being on Sunday. So, from a seller's point of view, I would wait 90% of the time. If a bully offer came in, I would put it off and just say, "Oh, thanks for the offer, but offers are on Sunday." And then from a buyer's point of view, you read it. You don't want to upset the sellers by coming in with a bully offer. And then secondly, if you're going to come up with a bully offer, you have to make it very, very attractive. You can't come in knowing that the property is under listed, coming in at full price with conditions in the offer, because you're just not going to get it and you're wasting your time. You have to come in at a very aggressive price and you have to really think about your conditions, if you're going to have conditions in there. In most cases, if they're going to accept an offer, it has to be clean with no conditions. So hopefully that advice helps and explains it a little bit. 

Let's see, getting to the sales for Milton and Georgetown. Milton is interesting because 2020, we had 54 sales last week, 36 last year, so we're still up. 26 detached homes sold, 9 days on the market and the price $1.198M on average - which is officially the highest I've ever seen in Milton, and I've been selling in Milton for over 15 years.  I've never ever seen the average that high. 26 homes sold on average, almost $1.2M, which is crazy. And then 15 townhomes sold at $737k, 7 days on the market. 12 semis, 6 days on the market, $834k average. And then condos are still doing well. They're up from last year - 7 sales last year, 8 sales this year, $540k on average.  

You have to remember that whatever happens in Milton happens to Georgetown a few weeks or about a month later because it filters through it. Like I've said earlier in videos it filters out of the GTA. And right now in Georgetown, what I'm seeing is so many people are leaving because they want more property. They're leaving Milton, they're leaving Mississauga, they're leaving Toronto, they want more property, they want the country kind of feel, they want small town feel. So Georgetown is just going through the roof.  20 sales in 2020 as opposed to 12 last year at this time and 14 detached sold, $1,000,050 on average, 5 days on the market.  5 towns sold for $710k on average, 6 days on the market, and 1 semi sold for $760k. And that was in three days. 

So things are moving well. As long as you're price is right, things are moving well. Right now, I'm finding a few people are overpricing because they see the market going up and up and up and up and they think, "Oh, okay, I can ask this and I'll get it." But not always. You have to be right on the money with your pricing, even though the market is crazy, crazy hot too. Another thing to think about is I have a feeling it might start to slow soon because I've had people asking me that. And once the public starts asking that, once it gets into people's minds that starts to slow things - but not yet. It's still really, really active and really busy. And even if it does slow, I can't see it slowing much.  I've been wrong in the past and it's so hard to predict, so don't try and time the market. Like I always said, when you buy a house, buy it to live in. Anyways, any questions, give me a shout - I'm always around. Thanks, take care.