Sometimes the questions I get from my clients trigger longer chains of thought, and today was one of those days. The client is coming from out of state, and they had just a received a pretty low offer on their current home. They wanted to know how low offers were working here. I pulled some statistics to see how they were effectively working, (since I knew several of my own listings had recently received low offers recently that did NOT work out). I was very surprised to discover that in their segment, from May 1 through today, the average selling price was 99.3% of the list price. This was despite the relative softness of prices in our market. My conclusion is this: always look at a complete list of comparable sales before evaluating what to offer. While low offers are receiving a lot of press these days, the fact is, a low offer seldom actually gets the job done, and usually results in a lot of wasted time and energy. That is not to say that low offers are never accepted, but at least here, in general they are not winning the day. The most effective low offers tend to be where the seller has the equity, really wants or needs to get on with their life, and has little ego tied up in the process. As the statistics seem to show, that tends to be rare.