How to evaluate a property offer (when you don’t have an agent)

Here’s a moment most “how to sell privately” guides go strangely quiet on: the offers have started coming in, and now you have to actually decide. One buyer’s offering more but wants you to wait while their finance comes through. Another’s offering a touch less but is ready to sign tomorrow. A third has thrown in a number that made you laugh, then apologise to the room.

This is the part an agent would normally walk you through — and the part that, done well, is worth far more than their commission. The good news is that evaluating an offer isn’t a dark art. Once you know what to look at beyond the headline price, you can read an offer as clearly as any agent would. So let’s go through exactly how to do that.

The single most important thing to understand first: the highest offer is not automatically the best offer. Price matters enormously, of course. But an offer is a package — price plus the terms attached to it — and a slightly lower offer with clean, certain terms will often serve you better than a higher one wrapped in conditions that might never be met. We’ll show you why in real dollars shortly.

First, the rule that protects you: nothing’s binding until it’s signed

Before you weigh a single offer, take the pressure off yourself by remembering this. In Australia, a property sale only becomes legally binding when the contracts are signed and exchanged — not when an offer is made, and not when you say “yes” over the phone. Up to that point, an offer is an intention, not a commitment, on both sides.

That cuts two ways, and both are in your favour. The buyer can’t force you to sell just because they’ve made an offer — even one at or above your asking price, you’re free to say no. And you’re not locked in either, which is exactly why we always tell sellers to keep marketing the property until it’s unconditionally sold. If a buyer’s uncomfortable with that, you can keep the listing live but flagged as under offer — and use it, gently, as a nudge for them to get moving. (The flip side is that until contracts are exchanged a buyer can walk too, so the goal of everything below is to pick the offer most likely to actually cross the line.)

So: you’re in control here. Now let’s work out which offer deserves a yes.

The six things to weigh in every offer (not just the price)

When an offer lands, look past the number to the whole shape of it. Here are the six things that actually determine how good an offer is:

The price. Obviously. But hold it loosely until you’ve checked the other five — a strong price with weak terms can be worth less than it looks.
The deposit. A larger deposit (10% is the customary figure, though it’s negotiable) signals a committed, financially-ready buyer and gives you a bigger cushion if things go wrong. A wafer-thin deposit can be a small red flag.
Finance status. Is the buyer paying cash, do they have formal (not just “pre-approved”) loan approval, or is the offer “subject to finance”? An unconditional, finance-ready buyer is far less likely to fall over than one still waiting on the bank.
The conditions. Every “subject to…” attached to an offer is a door the buyer can walk back out of. Subject to finance, subject to a building and pest inspection, subject to the sale of their own home — each one adds risk and time. Fewer conditions means more certainty.
The settlement timeframe. Does their preferred settlement date suit you? A buyer who can match your timing — whether you need a quick settlement or a longer one to line up your next move — is worth real money in convenience and reduced stress.
The chain behind them. Is this buyer’s purchase dependent on them selling something first? An offer that’s “subject to sale” of the buyer’s existing property hands your timeline to a sale you can’t see and can’t control.

Run every offer through those six and a clear picture forms — not “who offered the most,” but “whose offer is most likely to settle, on terms that suit me, for the best net result.”

Two offers compared: why the lower one can win

This is the trap that catches DIY sellers, so let’s make it concrete. Imagine you’ve listed a home and two offers arrive on the same day:

	Offer A	Offer B
Price	$735,000	$720,000
Deposit	5% ($36,750)	10% ($72,000)
Finance	Subject to finance (21 days)	Pre-approved, offer unconditional
Other conditions	Subject to sale of buyer’s unit	Building & pest only (5 days)
Settlement	“Flexible” (their unit must sell first)	42 days, fixed
Headline appeal	Highest price 🎉	$15,000 less

On price alone, Offer A wins by $15,000 and it’s tempting to grab it. But look at what you’re actually accepting. Offer A only completes if the buyer’s bank says yes and the buyer sells their own unit and that whole chain holds together — on a timeline you don’t control. If any link breaks, you’re back to square one, having taken the home off the market for weeks while enquiry went cold. Offer B is all but done: a solid deposit, finance already sorted, one short inspection condition, and a settlement date locked in.

Now put the $15,000 next to the risk. If Offer A falls over after six weeks and you end up selling for the market rate anyway, those six weeks of holding costs — mortgage interest, rates, the listing going stale — can swallow the entire premium, and then some. Offer B’s certainty is worth paying for. More often than not, the cleaner offer is the better offer, even at a lower number. The skill is pricing the risk, not just reading the price.

This isn’t theory. Across the private sales PropertyNow has seen over the years, the top number gets passed over more often than you’d think — our CTO, Coreyna Blachut, reckons a seller is better off steering away from it roughly a third of the time in a multiple-offer situation. In one sale, the seller took an offer $20,000 below the highest because that higher buyer was “subject to selling their own place” — which turned out to be barely listed. The bigger number was a mirage.

(None of this means you must take B as-is. You could go back to Offer A’s buyer and ask them to firm up — drop the subject-to-sale condition, shorten the finance period, lift the deposit — and let the two compete. Evaluating offers and negotiating them go hand in hand; there’s more on the negotiation side in our guide to negotiating when you sell your own home.)

Reading the conditions: what each “subject to” really costs you

Conditions are where offers quietly differ the most, so it’s worth knowing what each common one means for you as the seller.

Subject to finance. The buyer’s offer stands only if their lender formally approves the loan, usually within a set window — commonly 7, 14 or 21 days from signing. It’s the single most common condition, and a normal one, but it’s also the most common reason a sale falls through. In fact our team sees finance fall over more than any other condition, by a clear margin — usually a buyer running on a verbal “you’ll be fine” from a broker rather than a real pre-approval, or a valuation that comes in under the contract price. A shorter finance period and evidence of genuine, written pre-approval (not just “pre-qualified”) both reduce your risk; a vague, open-ended finance clause increases it.

Subject to building and pest inspection. The buyer can commission an inspection and, depending on how the clause is written, withdraw or renegotiate if it turns up problems. Reasonable for the buyer, and usually quick (a few days), but be aware it gives them a second bite at the price if something’s found.

Subject to sale of the buyer’s property. The buyer needs to sell their current home before they can complete yours. This is the condition to scrutinise hardest, because it ties your sale to a property you’ve never seen, priced by someone else, on a timeline you can’t influence. Our senior agent Chenelle Moothedom’s advice is to interrogate that other property before you lean on the offer: is it actually listed yet? Is it priced to sell? What’s the market like in that area right now? A buyer “subject to sale” of a home that isn’t even on the market — or one sitting overpriced in a slow suburb — is an offer built on sand, however good the price looks.

An offer with no conditions is “unconditional” — the strongest, most certain kind, because once signed there’s very little that lets the buyer walk away. Most offers are conditional to some degree, and that’s fine; the point is simply to count the conditions, understand each one, and factor the risk into how you rank the offers.

And here’s the honest bit: you don’t have to judge whether a condition is fair on your own. That’s exactly what a good conveyancer or solicitor is for. Our team’s advice to private sellers is blunt — get strong representation reviewing the contract and its conditions for you, rather than trying to work out the fine print yourself. It’s their job to spot the clause that’s quietly weighted against you.

Warning signs from the frontline “Always give preference to cash buyers — they’re far more likely to go unconditional. The offer I’ve seen fall over most is the buyer who hasn’t got finance approved but assumes a good credit rating means they’ll be able to borrow enough — I’ve had sales collapse again and again because the buyer never checked their real borrowing capacity. Another quiet warning sign is a buyer in a hurry who doesn’t want to view the place. For an interstate investor that can be perfectly normal, but an owner-occupier who won’t inspect before offering is one to watch.” — Chenelle Moothedom, Senior Agent, PropertyNow

Handling multiple offers without losing them all

If you’ve marketed well, you might get several offers close together. Handled cleanly, that’s the best position a seller can be in. Handled cleverly, it’s how you lose every one of them.

The honest, effective way to run it:

Tell every buyer, in writing, that there are multiple offers and that you’ll accept the best one by a set time. You don’t need to — and shouldn’t — reveal what the other offers are.
Ask everyone to put their genuine best foot forward by that deadline: best price and best terms.
Keep the deadline short. Dragging it out adds stress and gives buyers time to cool off or find another property.
Then compare the best-and-final offers on all six factors above — not price alone.

What kills it is playing games: inventing phantom rival offers, going back and forth trying to squeeze an extra thousand, or treating buyers as if their good faith doesn’t matter. Buyers talk, buyers walk, and a reputation for sharp practice can empty your whole shortlist overnight. As Coreyna puts it, it’s the back-and-forth haggling, not the competition itself, that scares good buyers off — try to play them against each other to squeeze out a bit more and the serious ones feel used as leverage and walk, leaving you worse off than if you’d dealt straight with the strong offer in front of you. Fair and transparent genuinely wins here — it keeps everyone at the table and still gets you the best result.

Don’t slam the door on a low offer

A cheeky low offer is annoying, but resist the urge to reject it outright and move on. We’ve watched plenty of sales start miles apart and meet comfortably in the middle. A low offer is just an opening position — and an opening position is a conversation, not an insult.

Some low offers are all the buyer can genuinely afford. Others are a tactic — testing your reaction, fishing for your floor, giving themselves room to move up. Either way, counter rather than close. Come back with a figure and a short, genuine note on why your property is worth it, and keep the buyer engaged. Even if it goes nowhere now, leave the door open to come back to them if your situation changes.

And think beyond the dollar figure when you counter. Would you take a little less for a fast, unconditional settlement? Would a bigger deposit or a dropped condition change the maths? Some of the best deals come from trading on terms, not just haggling on price.

Knocked an offer back on price? Update your advertised figure

Here’s an important one that protects you and your buyers. If you turn down an offer that’s at or above your advertised price purely because you want more, then your advertised figure no longer reflects what you’d actually accept — and continuing to advertise the lower number to draw buyers in is underquoting. For licensed agents in New South Wales and Victoria that’s against the law, and advertising a price you won’t accept can be misleading to buyers wherever you are.

As a private seller you’re not an agent, but the principle is the same — and it’s how we ask sellers listed with PropertyNow to operate: keep your advertised price honest. If you’ve rejected an offer on price alone, update your advertised figure to one you’d genuinely accept. (If you turned the offer down for other reasons — settlement timing, conditions, inclusions — that doesn’t apply; your price guide can stand.) It keeps you clear of misleading-conduct rules, it’s fairer to the buyers spending time and money on your property, and it stops everyone chasing a number you were never going to take.

The frontline truth: your strongest offers usually come first

Here’s something twenty years of doing this teaches you that the guides rarely mention: the best offers tend to arrive early. The buyers who’ve been watching the market, know what your property’s worth and are ready to act are the ones who move in the first week or two. After that, enquiry naturally tapers, and the longer a home sits, the more buyers assume something’s wrong with it — which tends to lower the offers that come later, not raise them.

So when a strong, clean offer lands early, weigh it on its merits then and there. It’s genuinely tempting to knock it back and hold out for better, and sometimes that’s right — but understand you’re making a bet, and that every week the property sits has a real cost in holding expenses and fading interest. “Let’s see what else comes in” is a strategy with a price tag. Make sure the upside is worth it before you reach for it.

What our team sees “The serious buyers — finance sorted, watching the market — move in the first week or two; after that, the enquiry quality drops off. A seller who rejects an early strong offer hoping for more is usually chasing a ghost. We’ve watched sellers knock back several high offers expecting better, only to end up selling for less than what was already on the table. New buyers do keep entering the market — but don’t treat a strong early offer as one you can safely throw back.” — Coreyna Blachut, CTO, PropertyNow

You’ve chosen an offer — what happens next

Once you’ve settled on an offer, the path to a binding sale is fairly consistent across the country, with the fine print varying by state:

Get the full offer in writing — price, deposit, all conditions, inclusions (which fixtures and fittings stay) and the settlement date. A verbal “yes” isn’t worth much; the written terms are what matter.
Swap legal representatives’ details. You give the buyer your solicitor, conveyancer or (in WA) settlement agent’s details, and they give you theirs. If you haven’t engaged one yet, now’s the time — here’s why private sellers still need a conveyancer and what they do.
Your conveyancer prepares and exchanges the contracts. From here, your legal rep drives the process and tells you what to sign and when.
The deposit goes into a regulated trust account — your solicitor or conveyancer’s trust account, since there’s no agent trust account in a private sale. This one’s important: never ask a buyer to pay their deposit into your personal bank account. Deposits belong in trust, full stop.
A cooling-off period may apply. In most states the buyer gets a short cooling-off window after contracts are signed (it differs by state, and some states and all auction sales have none) during which they can withdraw, usually for a small penalty. It’s worth knowing where your state stands — we cover this in detail in our state-by-state cooling-off guide.

And move quickly. Until contracts are exchanged you have an accepted offer, not a sale — so the faster you get the buyer onto a contract, the less room there is for cold feet or a shinier option to lure them away. Treating an accepted offer as “sold” and easing off is exactly where private sellers come unstuck. Only once contracts are signed and exchanged is the sale truly binding. Up to that point, keep treating it as live — which is exactly why everything above is about choosing the offer most likely to make it all the way to settlement, not just the one with the biggest number on top.

The bottom line

Evaluating a property offer comes down to one shift in thinking: stop asking “which offer is highest?” and start asking “which offer is most likely to settle, on terms that suit me, for the best net result?” Weigh the price alongside the deposit, the finance, the conditions, the settlement date and the chain behind the buyer. Respect the early offers, counter the low ones rather than killing them, run any multiple-offer race fairly and in writing, and remember that nothing’s locked in until the contracts are. Get that judgment right and you’ll often pocket more from a “lower” offer than you would have from the headline-grabbing one — which is exactly the kind of decision an agent’s commission is supposed to buy you, and exactly the kind you can make yourself. And if it feels daunting the first time, take heart from what our team tells nervous sellers: it can be a stressful couple of days when you haven’t done it before, but it’s really not all that hard. For the bigger picture, our step-by-step guide to selling your home online walks through every stage around this one.

Frequently asked questions

How do I evaluate a property offer? Look past the price at the whole package: the deposit size, the buyer’s finance status, any conditions (“subject to finance”, building and pest, subject to the sale of their own home), the settlement date, and whether their purchase depends on selling something first. The best offer is the one most likely to settle on terms that suit you — which isn’t always the highest number.

Should I always accept the highest offer on my house? No. A higher offer loaded with conditions or shaky finance can be worth less than a slightly lower, unconditional, finance-ready offer that’s almost certain to settle. Weigh the price against the risk and the terms before deciding.

What does “subject to finance” mean for me as the seller? It means the buyer’s offer only stands if their lender formally approves the loan, usually within 7 to 21 days of signing. It’s normal and common, but it’s also the most frequent reason sales fall through — so a shorter finance window and evidence of pre-approval work in your favour.

Can I accept another offer after I’ve already accepted one? Until contracts are signed and exchanged, a sale isn’t legally binding, so technically yes — accepting a later, higher offer before exchange (sometimes called gazumping) is generally legal, though the rules and ethics around it vary by state. We recommend keeping your property marketed until it’s unconditionally sold, and being fair and transparent with buyers throughout.

If I reject an offer, do I have to change my advertised price? If you knock back an offer at or above your advertised price purely because you want a higher figure, then your advertised price is no longer accurate, and best practice — and what PropertyNow asks of its sellers — is to update it to one you’d genuinely accept. Advertising a price you won’t accept is underquoting, which is unlawful for agents in NSW and Victoria and can be misleading to buyers anywhere. If you declined the offer for non-price reasons (settlement, conditions, inclusions), your price guide can stay as is.

How much deposit should a buyer pay? Ten per cent of the purchase price is the customary figure, but it’s negotiable and can sometimes be lower or paid in stages. A larger deposit generally signals a more committed, financially-secure buyer and gives you more protection if the deal falls over.

Where does the deposit go in a private sale? Into a regulated trust account held by your solicitor or conveyancer — there’s no agent trust account in a private sale. Never ask a buyer to pay a deposit into your personal account; deposits must be held in trust.

How long should I wait before accepting an offer? There’s no fixed rule, but the strongest offers usually arrive in the first week or two while interest is highest. Holding out for something better is a legitimate strategy, but every extra week on the market carries holding costs and can soften later offers, so weigh the potential upside against that cost.

Want a pro in your corner at offer time?

Reading offers and negotiating is easier with seasoned agents to lean on. Sell your own home online with PropertyNow — licensed agent support seven days a week, and you keep the commission.

Sell with PropertyNow