A strange game

Well, it's been quite a dramatic first-offer experience. On Sunday, we put in a low offer for one of the houses that we had been looking at that had been on the market for a long time, in the hope that they might be getting a bit desperate by now and would be willing to negotiate despite the notorious toughness of the seller agent.

The next day, the owners asked us if we could move back the expiry date of the offer (typically they don't last more than 24 hours) so that they could discuss it further. That seemed like a good development, and a sign that they were really considering what I had thought might be immediately thrown out. That evening, we got a call from our agent saying that the sellers had other offers that they were considering as well, and that we'd hear again at some point in the morning.

Today, we got word that the owners had decided that they would pit us all in together in a house-buying deathmatch with the other offers, with each making a final bid and them then going for (presumably) the highest of those. We couldn't be told what the other offers were, but we did know that they were nearly identical to the maximum that we had indicated we were prepared to go to, so our bid was raised $12,000 from our initial offer and we threw in a rather sappy letter as well in the hope that that would convince them to choose us if all the offers were identical.

( So, did it work? )