CounterOffer · the negotiation engine

negotiate like your life depends on it.

chris voss negotiated hostage releases for the fbi for twenty-four years — bank robberies, kidnappings, terror cells, the conversations where the wrong word cost a life. CounterOffer is built on the framework he wrote: tactical empathy, calibrated questions, mirrors, labels, the patience to wait out a counter. you don't split the difference. you close under ask.

see what we find
— the problem

most brokers walk in blind.

they see the listing price and the photos. they don't know the seller is mid-divorce, that the place has sat for 240 days, or that it's burned through three agents since spring. they negotiate against a number. we negotiate against a person.

— the seller dossier

we read the other side before you sit down.

before you make an offer, CounterOffer assembles a dossier on the seller — drawn from the public record and our patent-claimed shadow inventory graph. three kinds of signal, one conclusion: how badly they need this done, and the number that gets it done.

— group a

why they're selling.

  • divorce & family-court filingsa contested split forces a sale and collapses the timeline. neither party wants to carry the asset.
  • estate & probatean inherited home is sold by heirs who want it closed and split, not maximized.
  • liens, judgments & tax debta seller with a judgment against them needs the closing more than they need the last 3%.
  • relocation & career signalsa new role in another city, a corporate move, a business in trouble. filings and press show it before the broker admits it.
  • social mediaa countdown to a move, a new baby, a school in another state. people narrate their own deadlines.

— group b

how badly they need out.

  • days on marketthe most honest number in real estate. 30 days is a seller with options. 240 days is a seller doing math at midnight.
  • price-cut historyevery reduction, its size, its cadence. three cuts in four months is a seller who has stopped believing their own asking price.
  • relisting & DOM resetspulled and relisted to reset the days-on-market clock. the reset itself is the tell. we count from the true first list date.
  • broker churnhow many agents the listing has been through. a home on its third or fourth broker isn't a hard sell, it's a desperate one. each fired agent is leverage.
  • expired & withdrawn historyevery prior failed attempt to sell, going back years.

— group c

what they can actually take.

  • mortgage balance & equitypublic filings show roughly what they owe. thin equity is a hard floor; deep equity is room you can open.
  • carrying coststaxes, common charges, the cost of an empty apartment every month it doesn't sell. time is a fee they pay and you don't.
  • sponsor & comp concessionswhat the seller or sponsor already gave up on comparable units. the concession they made before is the floor for the one you ask for.

this is open-source intelligence — public records and lawfully gathered data, scored by our shadow inventory graph. every dossier is bracketed by protected-class guards: we never infer or act on race, religion, national origin, family status, or disability. we read motivation, not identity.

— the method

FBI and CIA tradecraft. codified into every counter.

the dossier tells us where the other side is soft. the negotiation engine knows what to do with it — the same framework hostage negotiators train on, made specific to a New York closing.

— 01

tactical empathy.

name the seller's pressure before they do. "it sounds like timing matters more than price here." the number moves on its own.

— 02

calibrated questions.

"how am i supposed to do that?" beats a counter-offer every time. the other side solves our problem for us.

— 03

the patience to wait.

silence is leverage. CounterOffer doesn't fill it.

— 04

the concession ladder.

a credible anchor set against what the dossier says they'll take, increments that shrink on a deliberate curve, and a final number that's never round.

— the bluff

the other agent's phantom offer.

"we have another offer at ask." maybe. CounterOffer scores a claimed competing bid against eight indicators — timing, specificity, the listing agent's track record, whether it was ever put in writing. if it's a bluff, you don't pay for it.

— why no one else can do this

sixteen systems. one filing.

CounterOffer isn't a prompt. it's a set of patent-claimed subsystems — 283 pages, sixteen interoperating systems, Patent Pending · App. No. 64/069,761. the shadow inventory graph that scores who's about to sell. the tactical-empathy negotiation engine. the regulatory-threshold handoff that routes to a licensed human the moment a conversation crosses into regulated brokerage activity. the compliance guards that bracket every inference.

— behind the engine

Built on real deals.

Signal Homes was founded by a broker with 13 years and nearly 100 NYC closings. The negotiation engine behind CounterOffer was built and used on real transactions — and in multiple deals, it moved outcomes $100,000–$200,000 in the client's favor. CounterOffer is built to turn that edge into a system.

— for agents

founding-cohort agents get CounterOffer drafted into every offer and counter, with the full dossier and live-call coaching. you run the room. hudson runs the framework.

see the cohort →

know the other side better than they know themselves.

tell hudson the address you're circling. CounterOffer builds the dossier.

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