Useful Tips for Home Bidding

1. If you plan to submit an offer for a home for full asking price and you feel there might likely be other buyers willing to do similar things, then you should always give $1K more than the asking price. This strategy will significantly increase your chance of willing as a lot of buyers will stop at the asking price. I recently won a contract by using this strategy. The home was asking for $319,900. I submitted an offer for $321K, which is $1K more than the asking price. After we won, the seller agent told me that she had two other offers at $320K, which is just the asking price.
2. If you are thinking about significantly increase the price from the asking price, you should always use an escalation clause to make sure you won't over pay. You can just increase the price by $1K till your maximum acceptable price. Since the escalation clause require the seller to provide a copy of the other competing contract, the chances that the seller agent is tricking you would be low. For example, if the house is asking for $850K and you are willing to pay $880K. You should always wrote the contract to start at $850K and then increment by $1K till $880K instead of having a contract directly at $880K. I recently bidded a home asking at $850K and submitted the contract that way. Even though I did not win (the home was sold for $900K with 10 offers all of which is above asking price), I still feel I used the right strategy. I wonder if the $900K buyer would still win if he submitted $885K though. The link for the home is below in case anyone is interested.
    http://mrislistings.mris.com/DE.asp?k=3375980XNQcc&p=DE-205927789-474
3. Other than the price, I would recommend waiving the fulling contingencies to increase your chance of winning. This contingency include:
    appraisal contingency
    finance contingency (you should always do your finance eligibility on the mortgage before you even consider buying the home)
    lead base paint contingency if house is built before 1978
    termite inspection: instead of having seller pay for it, you can pay this yourself: it costs around $50. If there is any issue, the seller is always responsible to clean it up before the sale.

For reference, I have two other posts regarding the home bidding strategy. I am a big fan of strategy optimization and I would love to discuss the home bidding strategy with anyone who is interested. Share with you on any of your comments here
How much you should pay for your dream home?
Game Theory and Home Bidding Strategy