It was late summer in 2018 and the real estate market in Ohio was hopping. Listing a residential property that was priced right was a recipe for a quick sale. Thats exactly what happened! It was a competitive multiple offer situation and the listing agent (Alex) spent multiple hours gathering details from multiple emails, texts and phone calls from buyers agents. The offers were neatly organized in an excel document and presented to the sellers like this Rock Star agent normally did in these situations. After a couple back and forth counter offer conversations, the sellers were happy with what they saw and accepted to highest and best offer.
While still riding the high of such an chaotic weekend spent processing offers, Alex was a bit tired and burnt out however still a bit energized until Monday afternoon he received a call from another local agent. That local agent asked if his offer was presented yet to the sellers.
Alex's heart sunk.
He realized that he had totally missed an offer in his inbox and never presenting it to the his clients. The craziest thing was that this offer happened to be the best offer by $4,000. Not good.
What is the right thing to do in this situation?
...Cover it up and pretend it never happened?
...Eat crow and let the clients know you screwed up and possibly miss out on future referrals?
...LIE & tell the local agent it was submitted?
Despite the terror of this situation, this is the birth of Offerin. There had to be a better way to organize all of the details, never miss an offer, organize all avenues of communication and improve the level of transparency for the sellers. The seller deserves better.
So a handful of business minded agents put their heads together and created a very basic beta version to manage and organize offers for their teams and brokerages. The OG version was fine until other agents submitted offers on behalf of their buyers into the portal and began sniffing around asking to use it too. After some significant investment in development and further testing, Offerin.io was launched to the public effective May 2024.
BTW: Alex the agent ended up doing the right thing. Accepted his mistake to the other local agent, confessed to the home owner and paid them his entire commission as recompense.
