With any real estate offer, there are three basic choices: Accept, Reject, or Counter. The first two are obvious. When it comes to countering the offer made by the buyer, the seller has to understand that the buyer has the same three options. If it is rejected, the deal is dead.

Twice in June, once as the listing agent and once as the buyer’s agent, we had counter offers from the seller that the buyer outright rejected. In both cases, the original offer made by the buyer was a good offer. The seller just wanted a little more out of the deal.

In reality, the seller would have accepted the buyer’s offer without a counter. In both cases, the deal died because the buyers knew they had made a good offer and felt slighted by the counter. In the Portland real estate market, buyer’s are writing much stronger offers knowing that they have to compete with others for a limited inventory of property.

Sellers need to ask themselves is it worth the risk of having to keep the house on the market, the inconvenience of being on the market and the likelihood that the first offer received on a property is often the best in the effort to earn an extra dollar?