Craig Rowe reviews Final Offer, a solution for helping listing agents get more money for their seller and buyers to always know exactly what it will take to win the home they want.
This article was last updated Feb. 13, 2025.
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Final Offer is a listing marketing and open offer management solution.
Platforms: Browser, iOS
Ideal for: Listing agents, brokerages, buyer agents and their clients
Initial review: Nov. 28, 2022
Update: Feb. 13, 2024
Top selling points:
- List price testing
- Private listing networks
- Beating market average sales price
- Offer activity alerts/timeline
- Home search experience
- In-app communications
Top concern:
Primarily, the education of the mass market on why being as transparent as possible through the offer process is best for all parties, especially buyers and sellers.
What you should know
Final Offer is an online listing marketing solution with onboard offer submission and management. In execution, though, it’s something much more. It’s a concept long overdue but still hard for the majority of the industry to grasp. The software allows listing agents to publish the full terms their seller is looking for alongside a full marketing breakdown of a listing — images, finishes, location, amenities, all the same stuff buyers expect from a typical listing website.
The company’s intent is to remove the vagaries around the market’s interest in a home for the sake of party-wide transparency. As I’ve said countless times in this column and to anyone who will listen: Everyone benefits from transparency in a real estate transaction.
There is no reason for the seller to not share or try to hide physical blemishes at the most basic level, and when it comes to offers on a home, there is no reason to not put the numbers out there for all to see.
Final Offer has changed a little since last year. It’s in 12 states: Connecticut, Georgia, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and Washington, D.C. In Canada, Final Offer is operating in Alberta and Ontario.
It now begins with broadcasting the standard market list price as the barometer for market interest. The seller also has an option to post their “final offer” price, meaning the exact number it’ll take for them to sign a contract right away based on overall deal value.
There’s also a third option, the minimum committed price. This communicates “the minimum total offer value that a buyer must meet or exceed in order to make an offer the seller is contractually committed to accept, provided the buyer also accepts all of the seller’s terms.”
An offer that meets the minimum committed price triggers a series of alerts to all parties that, in essence, real negotiation has started. The terms become public at that point, a timer starts, and subsequent offers need to be .5 percent higher than the last to earn a position.
Any or all three of the options above can be leveraged by the seller.
Buyers can register to receive alerts as new offers come in, whether they’ve submitted one or not. This can be done via sign riders the listing agent uses or through the property’s page on FinalOffer.com.
There’s a clear timeline of each offer with price and value, allowing each person to see if they can beat it clearly. The company also encourages listing agents to leverage its open house marketing feature, which displays the offer page on monitors or tablets around the home.
The price tracking mechanism is a great tool for buyer representatives who have strong buyers who can move quickly when they want a home. You can cease worrying about not being notified and thus having a pissed-off client. You can create serious buying power and seller interest by waiting for the right time to submit, too.
Why waste time challenging buyers you know you can beat? Move when it matters on behalf of your clients, and avoid listing agents who are slow to call or text you back.
Beyond its core pricing concept, Final Offer gives buyers an elegant search experience, a UI that lists all activity on a home, alerts agents and even interested buyers to changes and new offers, and plainly lists what it’ll take to meet the seller’s terms, as well as offering calendar views of all activity and a history of homes sold on the platform.
It is this very search experience that the company believes can be of additional value to its customers, new and existing. Final Offer has launched a product best defined as a private listing network, or a pre-marketing tool.
The word “private” tends to fire up some people these days, but in this use case, the company is merely allowing agents to create listings on its system for sharing before the 24-hour Clear Cooperation mandate kicks in and in cases where the seller agrees to opt out of MLS publication.
Additionally, once a listing is in Final Offer to be shared with those in the brokerage it’s ready to be let loose on the open market. It also provides two-way collaboration with clients and other agents.
Final Offer is merely improving a process that already exists and has since the dawn of email. There isn’t a brokerage anywhere with agents who don’t broadcast their coming soon inventory to fellow agents ahead of the open market.
The problem is that they often get sent around in halfhearted email threads and, worse, before all the listing details are in place, risking action being taken on a home before something like a flood issue or roof concern is found. Final Offer’s new service can alleviate that.
I find this to be a very clever use of Final Offer’s existing infrastructure. Its front-facing listing pages are some of the best in the market, so why not find more ways to use them? It also allows the company another selling point to get in the door with brokerages too narrow-minded to see the value in the company’s core competency.
This is the third primary player in real estate technology to offer this “pre-marketing” model in the midst of a major industry debate over the rights of consumers to decide where their home gets presented.
Compass has its “private exclusive” option, and Luxury Presence rolled out its Brokerage Listing Network service last month. For now, Final Offer is the only one that can silo the entire sales cycle, from marketing to, well, final offer.
I’m mixed on the Clear Cooperation issue. I fear for its impact on fair housing. However, at least the industry may finally make a decision that gives the consumer more say in the transaction — a concept Final Offer embraces more than most.
Remember that offers are ranked according to overall value, not just price, meaning the software will lend credence to a shorter close or non-financed purchase. When assembling an offer, the software can connect a hard value to each term.
For example, the closing date selection calendar applies a dollar amount to each day. The faster you close, the more value an offer has. The same is done for contingencies. A buyer may not reach a price the seller wants, but an offer with more favorable terms gets automatically elevated in the public timeline, again clearly displaying for everyone what it takes to get the deal over the finish line.
This is a super useful bit of coding, as it takes the guesswork out of offer analysis for the seller and helps educate them as to why some offers may be better even when the price isn’t the highest. And because offer terms are published, other buyers know why they lost the home or are encouraged to resubmit.
One caveat: Prices on offers submitted below the Seller Committed Price are not published, but everyone is still alerted.
The application’s counteroffer system gives sellers multiple options. They can counter with a new price and terms and leave the offer window open, meaning all other groups will be alerted and given a chance to beat the active buyer, even if they accept the counter. Alternatively, the software can close the listing upon the counter’s acceptance.
Buyers can upload a formal prequalification letter to register, as well as an additional disclosure form when registering to submit an offer that binds them to their deal within the confines of the software. The company’s terms of use don’t supersede state laws.
Final Offer also mandates sellers agree to their final published terms, so it’s not only buyers who are on the hook.
To be clear, this is not an auction platform; it’s merely yanking the curtains down from the offer stage.
Unless the law or a buyer explicitly prohibits it, there’s no reason to be secretive about offers. It’s antiquated and, frankly, tiresome. Your buyer either wants to buy the home, or they don’t. Final Offer plainly and legally shows buyers what it’ll take to get a contract signed. Why guess at it? After all, time kills deals, so the faster parties can arrive at an agreement, the better.
Know, too, that Final Offer doesn’t have to be the only way a listing agent markets a home. It can be used to re-energize stale listings, help an agent stand out in a listing presentation, or to get feedback on a home for a reluctant or difficult seller.
The company also told me that some agents are seeing success by using the Final Offer page as a call-to-action at open houses, displaying it on living room smart TVs or on tablets around the home. Talk about creating urgency.
Final Offer eliminates or greatly reduces the client’s ability to challenge an agent’s offer advice — because the writing couldn’t be more clearly etched into the wall. Think about how much time you waste reluctantly submitting garbage offers because, fiduciary obligations aside, buyers simply won’t listen.
Overall, the experience presents an Apple-inspired, minimalist user interface, with a less-is-more visual aesthetic, even in its detailed listing pages, offer submission workflow and onboarding experiences. It’s really well done.
This platform gives sellers a sense of order and structure to the sale. They know better what to expect and should see fewer offers not worth their time. It also gives buyers more market intelligence, helping them understand clearly where they stand amongst their competition. All the automation, features and coding may differ, but the value proposition here is undeniable.
Yes, I’m enamored by the idea of increased offer transparency. I want all of these companies to keep growing.
This is how I learned to sell real estate, and I maintain that the best form of salesmanship is honesty. Go ahead, point out the chipped paint, dated cabinets and driveway cracks. Most importantly, elbow out the tire-kickers as soon as possible. There’s no real pride in collecting bad offers. Be honest with sellers, too.
These sorts of solutions are what the painfully overused word “disrupt” should be reserved for because they fundamentally change how the industry carries out its business for the better. This is proptech as it’s meant to be upsetting to some and eye-opening to others.
The company landed $5 million in Series A funding in November and has also secured a number of enterprise brokerage partnerships to help agents gain awareness of it as an option, most recently inking a deal with Realty ONE Group Impact in Des Moines, Iowa. Final Offer has facilitated the sale of more than 300 homes and held 400-plus listings. It also signed William Pitt Sotheby’s last year, using an API for agents who want to display its tools on William Pitt’s website.
Final Offer is making some intelligent moves with its product. Most of its competitors have come and gone. Its technology and consumer-forward experience will afford it more opportunities within the industry. It can sell to teams, luxury brokers and the more clever branch of agents operating in each major market.
The company isn’t saying that it’s a replacement for traditional sales processes. It’s merely offering another marketing solution that’s better than the traditional sales process.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
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