Final Offer's model gains valuable traction: Tech Review Update

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Final Offer is a listing marketing and open offer management solution.

Platforms: Browser, iOS
Ideal for: Listing agents, buyer agents and their clients
Initial review: Nov. 28, 2022
Update: Nov. 25, 2024

Top selling points:

• List price testing
• Beating market average sales price
• Offer activity alerts/timeline
• Home search experience
• In-app communications
• Agent referral/connection

Top concern:

Primarily, the education of the mass market on why being as transparent as possible through the offer process is best for all parties, especially buyers and sellers.

What you should know

Final Offer is an online listing marketing solution with onboard offer submission and management. In execution, though, it’s something much more. It’s a concept long overdue but still hard for the majority of the industry to grasp. The software allows listing agents to publish the full terms their seller is looking for alongside a full marketing breakdown of a listing — images, finishes, location, amenities, all the same stuff buyers expect from a typical listing website.

The company’s intent is to remove the vagaries around the market’s interest in a home for the sake of party-wide transparency. As I’ve said countless times in this column and to anyone who will listen: everyone benefits from transparency in a real estate transaction. There is no reason for the seller to not share or try to hide physical blemishes, at the most basic level and when it comes to offers on a home, there is no reason to not put the numbers out there for all see.

Final Offer has changed a little since last year. It’s in 12 states total and in couple in Canada. They are Connecticut, Georgia, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and Washington, D.C. In Canada, Final Offer is operating in Alberta and Ontario.

It now begins with broadcasting the standard market list price as the barometer for market interest. The seller also has an option to post their “final offer” price, meaning the exact number it’ll take for them to sign a contract right away based on overall deal value, which means it’s considered with all the terms.

There’s also a third option, the minimum committed price. This communicates “the minimum total offer value that a buyer must meet or exceed in order to make an offer the seller is contractually committed to accept, provided the buyer also accepts all of the seller’s terms.”

Am offer that meets the minimum committed price triggers a series of alerts to all parties that, in essence, real negotiation has started. The terms become public at that point, a timer starts, and subsequent offers need to come in at .5 percent higher than the last to earn a position.

Any or all three of the options above can be leveraged by the seller.

Buyers can register to receive alerts as new offers come in, whether they’ve submitted one or not. This can be done via sign riders the listing agent uses or through the property’s page on FinalOffer.com. There’s a clear timeline of each offer with price and value, allowing each person to clearly see if they can beat it. The company also encourages listing agents to leverage its open house marketing feature, which displays the offer page on monitors or tablets around the home.

The price tracking mechanism is a great tool for buyer representatives who have strong buyers who can move quickly when they want a home. You can cease worrying about not being notified and thus having a pissed-off client. You can create serious buying power and seller interest by waiting for the right time to submit, too. Why waste time challenging buyers you know you can beat? Move when it matters on behalf of your clients and avoid listing agents who are slow to call or text you back.

Beyond its core pricing concept, Final Offer gives buyers an elegant search experience, a UI that lists all activity on a home, alerts agents and even interested buyers to changes and new offers, and plainly lists what it’ll take to meet the seller’s terms, as well as offering calendar views of all activity and a history of homes sold on the platform.

Remember that offers are ranked according to overall value, not just price, meaning the software will lend credence to a shorter close or non-financed purchase. When assembling an offer, the software can connect a hard value to each term.

For example, the closing date selection calendar applies a dollar amount to each day. The faster you close, the more value an offer has. The same is done for contingencies. A buyer may not reach a price the seller wants, but an offer with more favorable terms gets automatically elevated in the public timeline, again clearly displaying for everyone what it takes to get the deal over the finish line.

This is a super useful bit of coding, as it takes the guesswork out of offer analysis for the seller and helps educate them as to why some offers may be better even when the price isn’t the highest. And because offer terms are published, other buyers know why they lost the home or are encouraged to resubmit. One caveat: Prices on offers submitted below the Seller Committed Price are not published, but everyone is still alerted.

The application’s counteroffer system gives sellers multiple options. They can counter with a new price and terms and leave the offer window open, meaning all other groups will be alerted and given a chance to beat the active buyer, even if they accept the counter. Alternatively, the software can close the listing upon the counter’s acceptance.

Buyers can upload a formal prequalification letter to register, as well as an additional disclosure form when registering to submit an offer that binds them to their deal within the confines of the software. The company’s terms of use don’t supersede state laws.

Final Offer also mandates sellers agree to their final published terms, so it’s not only buyers who are on the hook.

To be clear, this is not an auction platform; it’s merely yanking the curtains down from the offer stage. Unless the law or a buyer explicitly prohibits it, there’s no reason to be secretive about offers. It’s antiquated and, frankly, tiresome. Your buyer either wants to buy the home, or they don’t. Final Offer plainly and legally shows buyers what it’ll take to get a contract signed. Why guess at it? After all, time kills deals, so the faster parties can arrive at an agreement, the better.

Know, too, that Final Offer doesn’t have to be the only way a listing agent markets a home. It can be used to re-energize stale listings, help an agent stand out in a listing presentation, or to get feedback on a home for a reluctant, or difficult, seller. The company also told me that some agents are seeing success by using the Final Offer page as a call-to-action at open houses, displaying it on living room smart TVs or on tablets around the home. Talk about creating urgency.

Final Offer eliminates or greatly reduces the client’s ability to challenge an agent’s offer advice — because the writing couldn’t be more clearly etched into the wall. Think about how much time you waste reluctantly submitting garbage offers because, fiduciary obligations aside, buyers simply won’t listen.

Overall, the experience presents an Apple-inspired, minimalist user interface, with a less-is-more visual aesthetic, even in its detailed listing pages, offer submission workflow and onboarding experiences. It’s really well done.

This platform gives sellers a sense of order and structure to the sale, they know better what to expect and should see fewer offers not worth their time. It also gives buyers more market intelligence, helping them understand clearly where they stand amongst their competition. All the automation, features and coding may differ, but the value proposition here is undeniable.

Yes, I’m enamored by the idea of increased offer transparency. I want all of these companies to keep growing.

This is how I learned to sell real estate, and I maintain that the best form of salesmanship is honesty. Go ahead, point out the chipped paint, dated cabinets and driveway cracks. Most importantly, elbow out the tire-kickers as soon as possible. There’s no real pride in collecting bad offers. Be honest with sellers, too.

These sorts of solutions are what the painfully overused word “disrupt” should be reserved for, because they fundamentally change for the better how the industry carries out its business. This is proptech as it’s meant to be: Upsetting to some, eye-opening to others.

The company landed $5 million in Series A funding in November and has also secured a number of enterprise brokerage partnerships to help agents gain awareness of it as an option, most recently inking a deal with Realty ONE Group Impact in Des Moines, Iowa. Final Offer has facilitated the sale of more than 300 homes and held 400+ listings. It also signed William Pitt Sotheby’s last year, using an API for agents who want to display its tools on William Pitt’s website.

Final Offer is Amazon’s Buy Now button for real estate, and the timing is right for it to scale.

Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe

Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.