Another perspective on pricing, negotiating and low offers

I received a low (LOW) offer on one of my listings at the end of this past week.  I'll round the numbers a bit to protect the anonymity if my clients and I will suggest that it was equivalent to a $280K offer on a $350K listing.  We were not (surprise, surprise) able to negotiate a contract after starting with such an enormous gap in pricing. 

After it was all said and done, I had a new insight on pricing that hadn't occurred to me before.  I found myself thinking....

Wait, really??  The buyers thought the sellers priced their home $70,000 above a price that they'd really take for the house?

Certainly, if I had clients who wanted to sell at or above $280K, I would never suggest that they list their home at $350K.  Perhaps we list the home at $309,900 at first, and then we might reduce it to $299,900.  But again, this is what it seems that the buyers must have been thinking --- that the sellers had come up with a list price that was $70,000 higher than what they would actually be willing to take.

OK, I know, there are some other angles here:

• It's possible that the $70K lower-than-asking offer was simply to try to warm us up to negotiating down $20K to $25K.
• The buyer was planning to come up some in their negotiations, thus they didn't really expect that the sellers would take that low, low price of $70K under asking price.

But yet, again, buyers need to consider that sellers are trying to price their homes as aggressively (low) as possible.  Don't be surprised (buyers) if sellers aren't able to negotiate too much on a sales price. 

That said, of course, I don't want buyers paying unreasonably high prices for homes.  Thus, if a house should be listed at $300K but is listed at $350K, my advise above shouldn't restrain you from making an offer for what you really think the house is worth.