Ask for a straight seller credit first, without touching your price. Raising your offer to fund a buydown means you are financing that buydown yourself, in a bigger loan, for as long as you own the home. If the seller agrees to a credit, you keep the lower purchase price and still get the reduced payment in the early years. That is the best version of this trade, because a credit at the original price is genuinely the seller's concession. A credit funded by a higher price is your own money moved around, and there is no such thing as free money in housing. Worth saying plainly: we lean against paying for rate buydowns as a default, and that lean does not disappear just because the mechanism is a bumped-up purchase price. The higher-price version only makes sense if two things are true: - The lower payment in the first year or two matters enough to justify a higher price and a larger loan. - You believe you can refinance out before the buydown period ends, and that is a bet on rates that nobody can promise you wins. Market leverage decides a lot of this. When sellers have plenty of buyers, they may not move at all. In a slower market, the straight-credit route often gets you there with no price bump. A 2-1 buydown comparison is something some people want to see, and we will run that comparison for you against your real numbers on the free Roadmap conversation, about 20 minutes.