I was thinking about a well-known idiom earlier today, and I wondered what the origin was…

When you’re really trying to get somebody to do something, or accept something, and you decide you’re going to work extra hard to get it done, you might use the words “jam it down their throats.”

Jam.  Ram.  Cram.  Shove.

Whatever word you want to use, it doesn’t change the fact that you’re doing something pretty violent, right?

Where does this idiom come from, and what’s the explanation?

Are you trying to get them to “eat” whatever you’re serving them?

Is it going down their throats because you want them to swallow it, ie. absorb and accept it?

What if they choked on it?  Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose?

In any event, I hear this phrase used very often in my line of work, and it’s uttered by buyers, sellers, and agents alike.

If you’re a buyer agent who is submitting an offer on behalf of a client, you might explain that you plan to present the offer quite aggressively and “Jam it down their throats.”

You could argue you’re doing the same thing from the other side, when presenting a seller sign-back to a buyer.

“Jam it down their throats” is most often used with respect to forcing the other side to accept an offer, so we usually assume that the jamming, forcing, or aggressively convincing the other party to accept has to do with price.

But there is another way that this term is used, and for which the idiom applies, and that is with respect to timing.

When you’re looking to “jam an offer down their throats” with respect to price, you’re probably being aggressive in terms of the way you speak, negotiate, and even provide ultimatums, such as “My clients will walk away after this.”

But when you’re looking to “jam an offer down their throats” with respect to timing, the aggressiveness is completely unspoken.

We often think of the “bullet points” of the offer as the price, deposit, closing date, and conditions, but what about the expiry of that offer?  That’s referred to as the “irrevocable date” or what we simply call “irrevocability.”

Let’s say that you’re the buyer for a hot property that’s listed for $1,099,000 with an offer date, and you expect this to sell for over $1,400,000.  Your fear is that it sells for way more, so you decide to submit a “bully offer” at $1,400,000 even.

You obtain a bank draft for $70,000 for the deposit, sign an unconditional offer for $1,400,000, and email the offer to the listing agent at 5:30pm.

Here’s the big question:

What irrevocable do you provide?

Do you give the seller until 12:00pm the next day?

God no!  Of course not!

You want an answer tonight, but more importantly, you want to limit the amount of time that the listing agent has to drum up other interest from other buyers.

So do you give the seller until 11:59pm?

That’s still too long.  Again, your goal is to have the seller say, “This is a great offer, we can’t turn this down and risk not seeing this price again on the offer night,” which is why you’re making the bully offer in the first place.  But your goal is to also ensure that other buyers don’t have time to come in and compete!

The reason you sent the offer at 5:30pm instead of noon is that you want to ensure that any buyer who does decide to compete won’t have time to run to the bank and get a deposit cheque.

But there is such a thing as too little time, right?

You can’t submit the offer at 5:30pm with a 6:00pm irrevocable.  What if the listing agent was in a meeting and didn’t check his or her phone until 6:30pm?

While you might decide to structure the irrevocable in a way that allows you to “jam the offer down their throats,” you have to ensure that logistics don’t get in the way.

You also need to ensure that you don’t scare the seller off, and this is something that a lot of buyers and buyer agents are failing to realize in this market.

If your bully offer, submitted at 5:30pm, had a 7:00pm irrevocable, a seller might be inclined to say, “What are we missing here?  Why are they trying to force this on us?”

I’ve seen this work for buyers before, but I’ve also seen it blow up in their face.

There’s a fine line between being aggressive and being unreasonable.

I was speaking to a colleague of mine earlier this week, and she said, “I just did a sign-back where we gave the seller a twenty-minute irrevocable.”

I couldn’t believe it.

Until she explained the situation, that is…

There was a condo listed for $699,900 and it had been on the market for 64 days, without a price reduction.

Her buyer offered $620,000, and the seller signed back at $680,000.

Her buyer then signed back at $645,000 and said, “This is our final offer.  We will not entertain anything higher.”

Sure enough, the seller signed back at $660,000, and the listing agent grovelled and said, “It’s only fifteen thousand dollars, see what you can do…”

The buyer walked, and the show was over.

One week later, the listing agent called the buyer agent and said, “Can you get that offer back on paper?”

The buyer agent said, “If I do, will your client accept?”

The listing agent said, “I mean, I’ll do my very best.”

The buyer agent replied, “That’s not good enough.  You tell me it’s a done deal, and I’ll get the offer back.”

What do you think the listing agent said?  Of course, he’s going to say, “It’s a done deal.”  The listing agent will do anything to get that offer back on paper.

The buyer resubmitted the offer of $645,000, and wouldn’t you know it, the seller signed back at $650,000.

“See what you can do,” the listing agent said.  “It’s only five thousand dollars.”

So what did my colleague do?

In her words:

“We signed back at $645,000, again, but this time we gave them a twenty-minute irrevocable.  Then I sent it to him and said, ‘fucking sign this or I’ll never answer your call again.’  And they signed it.”

A twenty-minute irrevocable, wow.

Now, let me tell you another story, and this one is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum.

In early January, a colleague of mine had an off-market listing that I took buyers to see, and they were very interested.

My buyers had just lost out on a house the week prior, having submitted an unsuccessful bid on the “offer night,” and they felt once-bitten, twice-shy.  As a result, when they decided to submit an offer, they wanted to do everything they could to ensure they didn’t lose this time around.

What did that mean?

Did that mean they should be aggressive?

Did that mean they needed to “jam an offer down the sellers’ throats?”

Not if they wanted to be successful, it turned out…

We drafted an offer on Friday afternoon, and by the time we sent it to the listing agent, it was already 6:00pm.

We provided an invitation until 11:00pm, which we thought was reasonable.

When I spoke to the listing agent, however, I soon learned that this was the wrong approach.

The sellers had been living in that house for thirty years!  Suffice it to say, they were very attached to the house.  Go on – raise your hand if you’ve been living in a house for three decades.  I would love to hear from you.

The sellers were also in Florida at the time, and they were just finishing a two-week vacation, scheduled to return on Saturday in the early evening.

The listing agent asked, “Can you extend your irrevocable?”

Fair question.

But this is normally the point where you’d expect me to point out the fallacy here!

Why would we extend our irrevocable, right?

Why give the listing agent the opportunity to “shop” our offer, right?

Why in the world would we bid against ourselves?

Those are all fair questions if you want to ask them, and as I said, I might be asking the same questions if I were writing a different blog post.

Not only that, you might scream, “David, this listing agent is playing you!  How could you fall for this?”

Again, in a different story, I would agree with you.  Even now, you still might want to believe this is all nonsense, but finish the story first…

The listing agent explained, “David, my clients have lived in that house for thirty years.  They’ve raised their children there.  They’ve now got grandkids playing in that house.  This is a very emotional process for them.”

I know, right?  You think this is all a game and he’s negotiating, right?

He continued, “They’ve been very non-commital through this process.  They want to sell, but they’re nervous, anxious, and unsure.  They asked me to put out some ‘feelers’ off-market just to get us started, and if you come in, guns blazing, I feel like we’re going to scare them off.”

Go on.  Tell me how you feel…

He further explained, “They can’t make this decision by 11:00pm tonight; there’s just no way.  They need to come back to Toronto, first and foremost, and be able to sit down with their family and talk as a group.”

That’s fair, isn’t it?

So I asked the agent, “Are you saying you want me to resubmit this offer with an irreovcable of 11:00pm on Saturday night?”

He replied, “No, David, I need you to resubmit this offer with an irrevocable of 11:00pm on Sunday night.  They’re in Florida tonight.  They land in Toronto on Saturday night.  They have an event on Sunday morning, and they’ll sit down as a family on Sunday afternoon and make a decision.”

Let’s pause here for a moment.

Tell me: do you believe this?  Is this sincere?  Or is this listing agent trying to play me?

I know that your inner troll wants so badly for me to be wrong about this, and to say that I was “played.”

But I believed the seller.  There was no reason not to.

When we went to view the house, the adult son was home to let us in.  He told us his parents were away.  He was kind, courteous, and showed us through.

This is a situation that I know, with one-hundred percent certainty, is not where you look to “jam an offer down their throats.”

Had my clients decided to say, “Take it or leave it,” and stick with our irrevocable of 11:00pm on Friday night, the sellers wouldn’t have batted an eye.  They were merely dipping their toe into the seller market anyhow.

In fact, to take this one step further, let’s talk about the “game” being played.  Because I personally believe that taking the course of action that we did was strategic on our part.

After consulting with my buyer clients, we revised our offer to include an irrevocable date of 11:59pm on Sunday, and we included a handwritten letter to the seller.

I know, I know, you’re thinking, “David, what gives?  You always mock the letter to the seller!”

No, I mock the letter to the seller when there are fourteen offers on a house in 2022, and a buyer makes an offer at the list price, but decides to include a handwritten letter to “tug at the heartstrings.”

In our case, we were fully aware that this was an emotional decision, and it was a complicated process, and the sellers weren’t completely committed to selling.  If we played our hand incorrectly, they might decide to hold off until April, as they had originally planned, or perhaps not sell at all!

Our revised offer was submitted on Friday night.

And we waited.

And waited.

And waited…

At 5:30pm on Sunday, the listing agent called me.

“David, thank you so much for your patience,” he said.

“I really appreciate you resubmitting the offer to allow my clients the time that they needed,” he said.

“They’ve come to a decision,” he said, and with that last line, I started to feel a bit anxious.  Every agent delivers news differently, but this felt like it was leading up to the wrong ending for my clients.

“This wasn’t easy,” the agent continued, “As I explained previously, they weren’t really all-in on this.”

That gave me a bad feeling.

But then came the word “however,” and I felt like our fortunes were about to change.

“However,” he explained, “They sat down with the entire family, all of them in one place, for the first time in a while, and they just got this ‘feeling’ that now is the time.  It just felt ‘right.’  So, I’m happy to say that we have a deal.  Congratulations.”

Geez, next time just blurt “YOU GOT IT” into the phone, why don’t ya?  That long-winded explanation made my heart sink into my stomach.

Once the agent had sent me the signed and accepted offer, we chatted a bit more.

He told me, “You know, most agents would have killed this deal.”

He said that if he were on the other side, and the listing agent asked him to extend the irrevocable by two full days, he’d have really had to question the angle.

“But it worked,” I told him.  “I trusted you to work with your clients.  You trusted me to get my guys on board.  We communicated.  We got it done.”

He laughed when I said that.

“That sounds like an ad for financial services or something,” he said.  “I mean, it doens’t always work out like this.  So many agents would have just put themselves in the way.”

That last point was a fair one, and it would be equally as fair for you or the next person to say, “I wouldn’t have trusted him,” as another agent, with another house, in another situation might have completely made that story up.

But this story, and the one that preceded it, collectively demonstrate that the irrevocable date on an offer can be just as important in the process as the clauses, conditions, closing date, or even the price.

In this market, not every part of the negotiation is distributive.  A lot of it is integrative, and that means working together to find common ground.

I suppose when all else fails, maybe that’s when you want to simply jam the offer down somebody’s throat…