Can sellers offer to cover the buyer's mortgage payments for several months in exchange for full asking price?

Not literally, no. What a seller can actually give you is a closing credit, and "full price plus six months of payments" mostly just relabels one. A seller cannot sign a contract agreeing to mail in your mortgage payments. A seller can give you a credit at closing, which frees up your own cash, and you can use that cash however you like, including making payments. Run the numbers and you can see why the framing is a wash for the seller. Say you agree to full asking of 500,000 dollars with an 18,000 dollar credit meant to cover six months of a 3,000 dollar payment. The seller nets about 482,000, because the credit cancels against the higher headline price. And remember whose money a concession is: yours, financed into the price you are paying. Where a credit genuinely helps is at closing, applied against closing costs. A credit toward a rate buydown is the other common pitch, and we lean against treating a buydown as the smart default, though the comparison is something some people want to see, and we will run it for you. Focus on your actual net cost rather than the packaging. If you want the numbers side by side, that is part of the free Roadmap conversation, about 20 minutes where we run your real numbers.