Here’s a high-level look at how to start honing your negotiation skills.
Negotiating skills come into play most when you’re a listing agent trying to win the listing. The fundamental thing you need to be thinking about is how you can provide value. To give a seller a compelling reason to work with you, you’ll need to come in and do something different from what your competition is doing. What are you bringing to the table?
For example, here at the Titan Team, we know that we’ll have the home pre-inspected so we can use that as a marketing tool and provide value for our seller’s position in the market. Secondly, we’ll make sure we get high-quality photos because we know those will help put our seller in a better position than the average smartphone photos will. Thirdly, we’ll do a staging consultation to make our seller’s home as presentable and attractive to the masses as possible.
The goal of each of these three services is to provide so much value to the seller that we effectively eliminate the need for future negotiations with another agent. How can you provide value when working with another agent on a deal?
If you got your listing under contract and are now trying to negotiate a better deal, you’ll often have to push forward to a certain level of uncomfortableness. Real estate agents can fall into the trap of thinking that every single deal has to fit a cookie-cutter model. What may seem fair and reasonable to us may not feel the same for our clients, so there are times when you’ll need to take yourself out of the process (i.e., your perceptions and feelings) as much as possible.
“Understand how each party defines ‘fair and reasonable’ before you commit to anything.”
Let’s say you’ve agreed to $2,000 in repairs on a deal but there is $7,500 worth of repairs that the buyer wants—how are you going to negotiate to a point where both the buyer and seller feel comfortable? In this scenario, be sure not to lay out all cards up front. Rather than just saying, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do,” which will drive the deal further down a particular road, ask this open-ended question first: “What is it that you feel would be fair?”
The answer may be more than you were willing to give, but the seller may have also fully expected to do all of the repairs and was pleasantly surprised to know that the buyer only wanted $3,500 worth of repairs. Understand how each party defines ‘fair and reasonable’ before you commit to anything—that’s how you’ll really begin to hone your negotiation skills.
There is so much that goes into negotiating, and it can’t all be covered in one video; stay tuned for follow-up videos on specific negotiating tactics! Hopefully, you found this introduction to negotiation helpful, and as always, reach out by phone or email if you ever need anything. We’d be more than happy to assist you.
