The number of offers you get tells you almost nothing about the price you'll close at. I have watched a seller take the highest of seven offers and close lower than a seller down the street who took the only offer he received. Offer count is the vanity metric. Certainty-to-close is the one that pays you.
A well-prepared building, correctly priced, draws competition early — a cluster of serious offers in the opening weeks rather than a trickle over months. But how many is the wrong question. The right one is how many will actually fund at the price on the paper.
There is no universal number, and any broker who promises you one before seeing your building is pitching. Offer volume is driven by three things: building size, submarket, and condition.
Size. Smaller buildings — say, five to twelve units — sit in the deepest part of the buyer pool. Private capital, 1031 exchangers, and local operators all compete for them, so these properties tend to draw the most offers. Larger institutional-grade assets have fewer natural buyers, so a strong campaign on a 40-unit building might produce three excellent offers rather than seven mediocre ones. Fewer offers on a larger building is not a weaker outcome. It is a different pool.
Submarket. Westside product in West LA or Santa Monica draws a different bidder than San Fernando Valley product in Van Nuys or Reseda. Each submarket has its own roster of active buyers, and that roster shifts quarter to quarter. A broker who knows your submarket can tell you who is buying in it right now.
Condition. A clean, well-documented building with reconciled financials invites competition because buyers can underwrite it with confidence. A building with documentation gaps, unpermitted work, or a difficult tenant situation thins the pool — sophisticated buyers either pass or price the uncertainty into a lower offer.
Two outcomes can both be good. The first is a competitive situation, where several qualified buyers bid against each other and the price gets pushed toward the top of what your building can support. The second is a single-buyer negotiation, where one well-matched buyer steps forward and you negotiate terms directly.
Sellers assume the first is always better. Not always. A competitive process is most valuable when your building is genuinely contestable — clean, mainstream, and priced to invite bidding. When a building has a quirk that only one type of buyer can solve — an Ellis Act play, a heavy value-add, an assemblage where the neighbor is the natural buyer — a focused negotiation with the right buyer often beats a wide auction that draws weak bids and tire-kickers.
The marketing process exists to manufacture competition where it should exist and to find the one right buyer where it shouldn't. Both require knowing the buyer pool before the building hits the market.
A bidding war is engineered, not discovered. Three things produce one.
Pricing discipline. List at a number the comps support and offers cluster fast. List well above what the comps justify and the building drifts — no serious bids, then a reduction, then offers that come in below where realistic pricing would have landed you. The highest asking price routinely produces the lowest sale price.
A real marketing process. There is no MLS for commercial multifamily. Your building reaches buyers through a broker's network, a built marketing package, and direct outreach to qualified, active buyers — not a listing posted and left to sit. The depth and accuracy of that outreach determines whether five right buyers see your building or fifty wrong ones.
Preparation that survives scrutiny. Across 254 closings, the buildings that drew the most competition were the ones where buyers could finish their diligence without finding surprises. Surprises are leverage — for the buyer. Clean preparation removes the excuse to retrade.
Here is the moment most sellers don't want to hear. An accepted offer is not a sale. It is an option the buyer holds on your building. A buyer can bid high to win the contract, then spend 45 days in diligence manufacturing reasons to renegotiate the price downward — a retrade. The seven-offer seller who took the top number sometimes closes for less than the three-offer seller who took a slightly lower bid from a buyer who actually closed.
Offer quality is measured in certainty-to-close: the size and structure of the deposit, how much of it goes hard and when, the length and looseness of contingencies, the buyer's source of funds, and the buyer's track record of closing what they sign. A non-contingent cash buyer at a fair number is worth more than a financed buyer at a higher number with a long inspection contingency and a thin deposit. Reading those terms — and choosing the offer most likely to survive escrow — is the actual work. Knowing which buyers are active in your submarket right now is where it starts.
Don't anchor on a number. Anchor on the process that produces real offers and the judgment that reads them correctly. That means pricing against real comps, not a flattering BOV, choosing the marketing approach that fits your building, and interviewing a broker who can name your buyer pool before listing. The full arc of how this plays out is laid out in the LA multifamily sales process.
The seller who chases offer count is counting the wrong thing. The seller who closes best counts certainty, and takes the offer most likely to turn into a wire — even when it isn't the highest number on the table.
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Michael Sterman is Senior Managing Director Investments at Marcus & Millichap, with $1.41 billion across 254 closings over 14 years in LA multifamily.
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