Bully offer
The BrokerFold Team — Product + Engineering
Last reviewed
A bully offer — formally a pre-emptive offer — is an offer submitted before the offer date a seller has scheduled, built to win the home before the planned competition ever happens. It is a creature of hot Canadian markets: wherever listings are held back for an offer night, someone will try to jump the line.
How they work
The play only exists because of the hold-offers strategy: list mid-week, show all weekend, review offers Tuesday. A bully arrives on, say, Saturday — priced well over asking, stripped of conditions, deposit ready — with a deliberately short irrevocable period that forces the seller to accept or lose it before Tuesday comes. The buyer pays a premium for certainty; the seller trades the unknown upside of offer night for a strong bird in hand. Everything that makes the offer attractive is written into the agreement of purchase and sale itself: terms, timing, and very little escape room.
The rules around them
Sellers choose. They can entertain a pre-emptive offer or instruct their brokerage that nothing gets looked at before the offer date, and the listing typically signals which. When a seller does decide to consider one, the listing brokerage carries notification obligations to the other buyers who have shown interest — the mechanics are set by provincial rules and board policy, and a buyer’s agent will know the local procedure. Ontario’s rules also let sellers opt into open bidding and disclose competing offer contents, though the traditional closed process remains the default.
Why speed decides them
Both sides of a bully offer run on the same clock. The buyer only gets the chance because they saw the listing within hours of it going live and toured it before the crowd; the seller only benefits if strong buyers found the home early. That is a plumbing question as much as a strategy one — a buyer relying on a portal that surfaces listings a day late never gets to write the early offer. Instant listing alerts from a board-fed site are the unglamorous infrastructure behind every successful pre-emptive move.
Frequently asked questions
Are bully offers legal?
Yes. A seller's offer date is a marketing plan, not a contract with the public — the seller remains free to consider an early offer, and equally free to refuse to look at anything before the scheduled date. Which way they'll lean is worth knowing before you write one.
How long does a bully offer stay open?
Deliberately not long — typically hours. A short irrevocable period is the whole mechanism: the seller must decide before the offer date arrives and the rest of the market gets its chance. An early offer left open until offer night is just a preview, not a bully.
Keep reading
- Irrevocable period The irrevocable period is how long an offer stays open for acceptance and cannot be withdrawn — the clock every Ontario negotiation runs on.
- Open bidding Under TRESA, Ontario sellers can opt into an open offer process and share competing offers' substance — the choice, and its limits, explained.
- Agreement of purchase and sale The APS is the contract at the centre of every Ontario home sale — offer, acceptance, deposit, conditions and closing terms in one document.
- MLS alerts Canada MLS listing alerts under your own brand: daily saved-search emails from your Canadian realtor site, with every recipient a contact in your CRM.