In today’s market, multiple-offer situations have become the norm. Kathy Damewood, broker associate and team lead at RE/MAX Alliance Group in Englewood, Florida, recently found herself in a situation that will sound familiar to many agents.
Damewood worked with her client to list a fixer-upper, priced to sell. “We got 55 offers on that property in three days,” said Damewood. She used Offer Manager by ShowingTime to simplify the offer review process for her client as well as to streamline communications with the agents who had to give their own clients the bad news of their rejected offers.
“Before Offer Manager, I would literally have to print out every offer. I either made my own spreadsheet or I had to jot the pertinent information down longhand on a big yellow legal pad,” said Damewood, a 31-year industry veteran. “It was cumbersome and a waste of time, and there wasn’t one place to keep track of the documents I needed.”
Using Offer Manager’s side-by-side offer comparison feature, Damewood showed her client the 55 offers on the property, sorted by price. They assessed the offers together, Damewood easily filtering out offers no longer under consideration, and the client chose the best offer for them. “I was able, in one email, to notify 54 agents that, unfortunately, their buyers were not going to get the property. That was a huge time-saver,” said Damewood.
Agents know that manually juggling offers is stressful, inefficient and chaotic, but there haven’t been many alternatives.
“Every agent gets tons of spam and has a very noisy inbox,” said Erik Lovell, senior principal product manager of the offers platform at ShowingTime. “The agent gets overwhelmed with all the activity and communication, can’t easily separate offers from the rest of their emails, and the entire process is frustrating for everyone involved. We knew there had to be a better way.”
Meanwhile, across the country, broker LJ Woodard with One Percent Listing Group in San Diego used Offer Manager to give his client a full view of the 17 offers they had received on the client’s property. “When the market is slow, it’s not so hard. But there hasn’t been a slow market since I started in real estate — it seems like it’s always been fast,” said Woodard, who has been in the industry for 15 years.
Like Damewood, Woodard used to rely on a time-consuming manual process to manage the receipt and sharing of offers. “Right out of the gate, I knew Offer Manager was awesome. It sends offers to clients at the same time they go to the agent, with all the terms organized,” said Woodard. “It saves an absurd amount of time. It’s a game-changer.”
Woodard said his success in using Offer Manager is more than a matter of saving time — it also wins listings. “In a market like this, it’s hard to get listings. Having a really good sales presentation is important,” said Woodard. “I use Offer Manager in my listing presentation as a selling feature. It’s high-tech and it’s real time, and it keeps the seller up-to-date on what’s really going on.”
When asked to describe in one word how Offer Manager has changed his business, Woodard said, “Efficiency. From the setup to getting the listing, to managing, processing, accepting and rejecting offers, to communicating with buyers’ agents throughout the process — it’s just super efficient.”
Offer Manager is an add-on to the ShowingTime platform, so users can get started right away without having to learn a new app. Find out more about options to use Offer Manager for yourself, your team or your brokerage.