Hello Hank,

As Irina mentioned, the market determines the price and every REO seller is different. If you are interested in the property you may want to consider putting your offer on paper. Have a buyer's agent prepare a sales agreement and send a good faith deposit with the offer. The seller will know your serious with a legal binding contract in front of them. If you wait for them to reduce the price you risk the chance of competing with other buyers. I am seeing it happen more and more recently especially on these foreclosed homes.

Regards,

Eric

Rule #1. The Market is regulating the housing prices, not REO sellers. It is all about demand and supply.

So, if there would be no demand for this property at its list price the sellers (with REO there are always a few decision makers) would need to make a choice: 1) whether to drop the price, or 2) whether to remove the property from the market until "better time".

Now, if the sellers had received an offer at a full list price, even if the contract fell through, the sellers would be expecting an offer for the same price. It is psychologically difficult to accept the fact that the price could have been too high. But slowly Rule #1 would bring the sellers back to their senses.

And another thing. Some REO sellers can be very patient. It might take a few months before they decide to reduce the list price. So, then the buyers need to decide what they want to do: 1) either to wait, or 2) to make an offer, or 3) to move on to another property (if there is a supply of similar homes available at a lower price). Here comes Rule #1 again.

If you really like the house and you are serious about making an offer, Hank, you need to hire a local Buyer Agent who would be able to analyze the market situation around this property, to give you an idea about the optimal (neither too high or too low) offer price, so that you could decide whether you want to write an offer. And then this agent 1) would WRITE an offer for you and negotiate it through the Listing Agent (talking in real estate is only good when you have something in writing to talk about) , or 2) would help you find a better property to meet your real estate needs.

If you are just "learning what the time frame", etc., the learning process can be interesting and exciting to some extent, but unfortunately there would not be any other rules to learn other than Rule #1.

Do not get discouraged.
All the best!