It was super stressful but eventually she succeeded.
If the bidding war isn’t as successful as the seller wants the apartment is taken of the market for a week and then reappears with at 30% price jack and a title that says “fixed price! First come first served”
You can use underpricing as a tool to hide problems with the house. If you have a lot of offers with what is a closed auction, you control the flow of the process and avoid learning things that have to be disclosed.
If you “suspect” that you may have mold, foundation problems, lead paint, asbestos, or other problems, you can use the offer flow to cherry pick bidders who don’t demand inspections or cash bidders who don’t have a bank or other party looking for due diligence. Your real estate agent may want to steer business to preferred partners for kickbacks or to ensure that certain home inspectors get used.
I would prefer if all the negotiations were public though.
The realtor's going to say: if you underprice then you'll get more offers and have a chance of starting a bidding war, which could put the sales price even higher than if you'd priced it more realistically.
It seems like a pretty clear-cut case of self-interest. And in this case, it looks like it worked.
If you put in a lower list price you will probably get 5+ offers, you can either pick the best one, or counter offer a few, and you can be almost certain that you will be under contract by mid next week if you list on a Thursday or Friday.
Most people are also buying a home at the same time, if they are moving to another high cost area a delay of a couple weeks on the sale of their home can cause a lot of problems with their purchase.
The other thing about this one is that it was fixed up, so it could have been a flip. However I didn't go track down the real estate records to know for sure.