My partner and I have decided to buy a house... so we started looking around every weekend, we were fussy, but we finally found a house we really liked, we knew our limit, so we made a verbal offer, The real estate (Go Gecko) came back to us and said the offer is too light.
So we discuss it and decide to go up 10 thou, and this time we wanted it on paper, the real estate said we didnt need to so we left it as a verbal offer, again the real estate came back to us saying it was too light, so again we went up but only 5 thou this time as we felt that since they didnt make an offer in return it seems we were the only one doing the offering (if the real estate were even taking our offers to the owner that is) anyway again they came back with nothing but it was too light! so we went up another 5 thou, making us 10 thou off their asking price! (no other offers had been made at this stage either)
The real estate agent said he would get back to us the next day, we didnt hear anything for about a week, meanwhile we had still been looking at houses and had found another house we were highly interested in so we made an offer, and everything was formal on paper and the ball was rolling and before long we had an agreement on a price we just had to sign for it, and we end up getting a call from Go Gecko Real estate before we signed for the new house.
They called to let us know that there had been another offer on the house and they wanted to let us know it was under contract!
Now had that real estate treated us like home buyers and seriously he would have done the offers formally and then he would have had to have let us know that another offer was coming into play, and we could have had the chance to make another offer!
Thankfully we had found another house and the Real Estate (RAY WHITE CENTRAL) and the agent Miranda were extreemly helpful, kind, honest and alway followed up when she said she would!

Good luck to other home buyers and watch out for the nasty real estates