It is a matter of personal ethics that I would never tell a potential Buyer that I have “another Buyer” unless I had another Buyer. Sometimes if there are many Buyers in various stages of due diligence, I’ll tell them exactly how many I’m dealing with. Credibility and reputation matter to me, but to some, not so much.
Does anyone honestly believe someone when they say, “I’ve got other people interested”? Not usually. Even though I don’t tell anyone this without truth behind it, I doubt they believe me half the time, either. It is probably just dismissed as a sales technique, with the fact realized only when they lose the bidding war on a property, and it gets sold to the other guy.
But these are the games that amateurs play with people, and most of the time, there is no other Buyer. Not only is that unethical if untrue, but it’s also negotiating in bad faith. Some dirty brokers take it too far.
About three years ago, I was negotiating a domain purchase. The price was somewhere around $35k, I believe. The domain was valuable, but it had been up for sale for quite some time. Pricing is often determined by much longer the Seller wants to hang onto it when it comes to domains. You’ll see valuable domains drop in value to get them out of their portfolios. [Continue Reading in XBIZ Magazine]
