The most important act in real estate is the one you will fight hardest to avoid.
I spent an hour trying to name the one property I analyzed and never made an offer on.
I cannot do it.
Not because there isn’t one. Because there are too many.
I still have the file cabinet. Actual paper. Three-part carbon forms, filled out by hand, some in pencil, some in pen, back when running a property meant sitting at a kitchen table with a calculator and pressing hard enough for the copy underneath to take.
I could go back through those drawers right now and pull out hundreds of properties that passed every filter I had at the time.
Hundreds.
I analyzed them. I liked them. I never wrote the offer.
Now let me be very clear about something
I am not telling you that houses go up. I am not telling you that every property is a good investment, or that time fixes a bad buy, or that you should go pay any price because it will all work out in twenty years.
It will not. Most properties are mediocre investments. A small percentage of what is on the market at any given moment will actually perform as a long term hold for an investor. That is exactly why we analyze in the first place, and it is why the filters matter.
What I am telling you is narrower and more uncomfortable.
The ones I am talking about had already passed the filters.
They cleared the analysis. They worked on the numbers I trusted at the time. The work was done. The only step left was the one I did not take.
And for context on what the intervening years did, in January 2005 the national benchmark price in Canada was $236,900. Earlier this year it was $661,100. Roughly two and a half times, over twenty years, in a country that spent most of that stretch being told housing was about to fall apart.
Time is undefeated. It does not care how good your spreadsheet was.
I will be honest, writing this paragraph out was a little depressing. Stay with me, because that is not where this lands.
I told myself I was being disciplined. Some of the time I was being scared. Those two things look identical from the inside, and that is the whole problem.
There are only a handful of moments that actually move a deal
In this business there are what I call critical success events. Not tasks. Not activities. Events, where something that could not happen before becomes possible after.
Writing the offer is the biggest one.
NOTHING happens until an offer is written. Not a negotiation. Not a counter. Not a relationship with a seller you circle back to in eighteen months. Not a lesson. Not a deal.
Nothing.
Everything before the offer is preparation. Everything after it is real. And this industry has built a comfortable, respectable, spreadsheet-shaped waiting room where you can spend three years feeling productive without ever crossing the line.
The client who negotiated against himself
About a year ago I had a client looking at a property. The analysis was excellent. Disciplined. Every number stress tested, every assumption challenged. Better work than most people do on a deal they actually buy.
His number came in well below the ask.
And then he started negotiating against himself.
Me: “Great analysis. When are you writing the offer?”
Him: “It’d be too low. The seller would never take it.”
Me: “How do you know?”
Him: “I’d have to change my price and the seller would never go for it.”
Me: “How do you know?”
Round and round.
He did not want to write that offer. He wanted me to agree that not writing it was the smart play. So we stopped debating, and I gave him a task with a date on it. Write the offer. Price it for every single problem you would have to fix. Report back to me the moment it is submitted.
He wrote it kicking and screaming.
The attachment was never to getting it accepted. The attachment was to trusting the process, doing the work, and hitting send.
It got flat out rejected.
Then came the part nobody posts about
The follow-up. Six months of it. On a schedule. Reported back every single time.
Eventually he got one accepted. Not at his number.
But he negotiated a spring possession instead of a winter one, which more than paid for the difference in price. Anybody who has taken possession of a property in January in this country knows exactly what that is worth.
So what actually changed?
Not his analysis. His analysis was already good. It was good six months earlier, when he was using it as a reason to stay still.
What changed was that there was a task, a date, and somebody on the other end waiting for the answer.
That is it. That is the whole intervention.
The reframe
Most investors think the offer is the end of the process. Submit it, hold your breath, find out if you won.
The offer is the beginning of the process.
It is a question you cannot get answered any other way. It is the only tool that tells you what a seller will actually do, as opposed to what the listing says they want. A rejected offer is not a failure. It is paid market research, and the price of admission is your ego.
You are not stuck on the analysis. You are stuck on the sending.
The analysis is where you hide. It feels like work, it looks like work, and it costs you nothing. The send is where you find out. That is why one of them is comfortable and one of them is not.
And look, I get it
Writing the offer is the scariest part of this whole business. Not the financing. Not the tenants. Not the renovation. The offer.
Because the offer is the first moment a real human being on the other side gets to say no to you.
We are all wired to be liked. Most investors I know are decent people who do not want to insult anybody, do not want to be seen as the lowballer, do not want to look like they do not know what they are doing. So they soften the number, or they wait for a listing where they will not have to be uncomfortable, and that listing never comes.
Here is what almost nobody says out loud. That reaction is not a character flaw. It is being a person.
The fix is not to become a colder human being. The fix is to stop being the only set of eyes on the deal.
Somebody who is not emotionally attached to that property can look at the same numbers and say “that is a fair offer, priced for the work” in about four minutes. Not because they are smarter than you. Because it is not their ego in the file. A partner, a mentor, a coach, a sharp broker who will tell you the truth. Anyone whose feelings are not in it.
You do not need to feel brave. You need a second pair of eyes and a deadline.
Do this before you sleep tonight
- Name the one property you have analyzed and never offered on. You already know which one it is.
- Put a date on the offer. This week, not this quarter.
- Price it for every problem you would have to fix. Do not chase the ask to make it feel more acceptable.
- Send the numbers to one person who is not emotionally attached, and ask one question: is this a fair offer for what I would be taking on?
- Tell that same person the date, and tell them you will report back when it is submitted.
- Put the follow-up in your calendar NOW, before you get the answer. Six months of touches, scheduled, so a no does not get to end the story.
Steps 4 and 5 are the ones people skip. They are also the ones that work.
Now back to that file cabinet
I could sit down with those drawers and spend a weekend building a very detailed monument to every deal I did not do.
I am not going to. And neither should you.
Because here is the thing about a file cabinet full of properties you passed on. It is only a graveyard if you read it that way. Read it the other way and it is proof that you were doing the work, sharpening the filters, and getting closer.
And in the same drawers are the ones I DID write offers on.
The ones that got rejected and came back. The ones I bought that made a lot of sense at the time and made even more sense fifteen years later. The ones that funded the next thing, and the thing after that. The ones that are still working for me while I sit here typing this.
Do not grieve the offers you never wrote. Celebrate the ones you did.
That is not a consolation prize. It is the actual scoreboard. Every single good thing in my portfolio traces back to a moment where I was uncomfortable, uncertain, not fully ready, and I wrote the offer anyway.
None of it traces back to a moment where I analyzed something beautifully and went to bed.
Twenty years from now you will have your own version of my file cabinet. The question is not whether it will hold some regrets. It will. The question is how thick the other file is.
And once you have written it, the next question is what you are actually buying. I wrote about that one here, using the town that raised me as the cautionary tale.
Get out from behind the keyboard. Do the reps. Write the offer.
You are closer than you think…
In your corner,
Russell Westcott
#Inspire #Encourage #Love
P.S. If the thing standing between you and your next deal is the send button and not the spreadsheet, that is a fifteen minute conversation. I open up select times in my calendar. Book one here.
