Multiple Offers and Bully Offers: What Actually Happens
When a well-priced home in Erin or Orangeville gets five or six showings in the first weekend, you’ll usually hear two terms thrown around: multiple offers and bully offers. They work differently, and knowing which situation you’re in changes how you should approach your offer.
How a standard multiple-offer process works
The seller sets an offer date and time, often after a week or so of showings, and every interested buyer submits their best offer by that deadline. Offers are typically presented to the seller all at once, with agents representing other buyers waiting in a separate room or on a call. The seller can accept one offer, reject all of them, or — less common now than it used to be — go back to the top one or two buyers and ask if they’d like to improve their offer. You usually don’t find out what the other offers were, only whether you won.
What a bully offer actually is
A bully offer (sometimes called a pre-emptive offer) is a strong offer submitted before the seller’s stated offer date, specifically to try to end the process early. For a seller to legally consider it, their listing agreement has to allow pre-emptive offers — this is a checkbox on the listing agreement, and not every seller has it enabled. If it’s allowed, the seller’s agent is required to notify every agent who has booked a showing or requested the listing information that a bully offer has come in, giving them a chance to submit their own offer before a deadline the seller sets, often as little as 24 hours.
Why buyers submit bully offers
The logic is straightforward: skip the uncertainty of a crowded offer night by making it clearly worth the seller’s while to stop the process early. A bully offer needs to be priced meaningfully above what the buyer expects the home to sell for on offer night, usually with fewer conditions and a flexible closing date, to actually be tempting enough for a seller to cut the process short.
What this means if you’re on the other side of one
If you’ve booked a showing on a home that then receives a bully offer, you’ll typically get very little notice — sometimes under a day — to decide whether to compete. This is exactly why we tell buyers looking in Orangeville and Erin right now to have financing fully sorted, not just pre-approved, before they start seriously touring homes. You cannot assemble a competitive offer overnight if you’re still waiting on paperwork from a lender.
Are escalation clauses a good idea here?
An escalation clause (an offer that automatically increases by a set amount above the next-highest offer, up to a cap) is legal in Ontario but genuinely rare in this market, and we generally advise against them. They reveal your ceiling price to the seller’s agent and can create disputes over what the "next-highest offer" actually was, since that information usually isn’t independently verified. A well-researched, clean, single best offer tends to perform just as well without the downside.