No rule says you should accept the first offer, and no rule says you should turn it down. How quickly an offer arrives tells you very little on its own. The real decision comes from the details: their proceedablilty - chain or no chain, if they have an offer agreed on their side, their financial position and if their timefrmaes match yours.
The short answer
You are not obliged to accept any offer, at any point. An offer is a proposal, and until contracts are exchanged that is all it is. Accept it, counter it, or leave it on the table while you think.
When an offer arrives says very little about how good it is. Who made it says rather more.
Why good offers often arrive early
The buyers who move first are usually the ones who have been at it longest. They have their alerts on and they have seen your listing before breakfast, and they introduce themselves with a mortgage agreed in principle rather than waiting to be asked for one. They know within a minute of your hallway whether yours is the one.
So they act quickly, and they are not weighing your home against something that might come up later. They are weighing it against everything they have already seen. Worth remembering before you read an early offer as a sign you went to market too low. Sometimes it is. More often than not, the first offers are from the most mature market buyers who have been in the market for a while. They move quickly as they are confident in what they want and what they feel the property is worth.
Do I have to accept the highest offer?
No, and you do not have to accept any of them. The highest number is the obvious thing to weigh, and you should weigh it. It is just not the only thing on the table:
- How ready they are. A buyer in a chain is not a slower buyer. A family whose own sale is agreed and whose solicitor is instructed might even move faster than a first-time buyer with nothing to sell and no idea what happens next. The question is how organised they are, and if they are selling, what stage they're at.
- Their funding. Mortgage agreed in principle, or money coming out of their own sale. Either way they should know exactly where it is coming from and be able to show you. Clear answers here are worth a great deal.
- Their timeline against yours. Somebody moving for a job start or a school term has a date they are working towards, and if it sits near yours, everything after this gets easier.
- What is attached to the offer. Some arrive with conditions. Subject to their own sale, subject to a survey, subject to you leaving the curtains.
- Who ends up in the house. Not every seller minds. Plenty do. If you have looked after a place for thirty years and want it to go to someone who wants it for the reasons you did, that is a perfectly good basis for choosing. It is still your house until it isn't.
How we put an offer in front of you
None of this should land on you as a phone call and a figure. By the time an offer reaches you, we have had the conversation behind it: what the buyer has to sell, where the money is coming from and what they can show for it, and why they want this house rather than the one down the road. We have had the same conversation with you, so we know which of those answers you care about.
Then we bring you the offer with the story attached, and a view from the Negotiator who has sat across from both of you.
Foxtons is London's number 1 estate agency brand, so our Negotiators are having this conversation somewhere in the capital every working day. When you sell with us, our insight on the offer in front of you is based on training, the conversations we're having and our extensive experience in the market. (Source: TwentyCi data, 2025 new instructions at a brand level.)
The decision stays yours, first offer or fifth. We just make sure you have everything you need to make it.
"The number is the number. Sellers get nervous about the first offer, because they assume there must be a better one behind it. If it is not the deal you want, tell us and we will go back and work on it. But it's not about when the deal comes, rather what it involves. We'll help you figure out exactly what you're looking at so you can make the best decision."
James Stevenson
Managing Director of Sales at Foxtons
Source: This article draws on the Foxtons Sales department, whose negotiators check and present offers to sellers across London every working day. If you have any questions on this article, email us to ask a Foxtons expert.
