It’s Our Time to Shine
Last week, I wrote about our transitioning market and the opportunity for REALTORS® with advanced negotiation skills to achieve better outcomes for your clients, gain market share and thrive as the high-level professionals that you are.
Most of you that read this blog weekly have taken negotiation training with me. Let’s really put that learning to work for you and more importantly, for your clients.
We finally have a market that will reward the REALTORS® who have valuable knowledge, high-level skills, and professional ethics and expose the folks that have been riding the wave of a market high with pretension, luck and an inflated sense of value.
It’s our time to shine.
Last week I touched on the CNE/MCNE tools of SAM model, Power Analysis and Gathering Information. There is tons of room to expand on those (and we will in the Advanced Negotiation Workshop) but this week, let’s look at a few others – Types of Negotiators, Managing Emotions, Building Trust and Persuasion.
Read Last week’s Blog
Types of Negotiators:
In this market, the differences between competitive, compliant, and collaborative negotiators become increasingly bold. As the market transitions, who holds the power is nuanced, uncertain, and always shifting. Deal-making is harder.
A competitive approach (win-lose) may be beneficial when you hold all the power and everyone knows it. As markets become more balanced, this approach will seem arrogant, aggressive, unfounded, and could make negotiations more difficult or even failed. A competitive seller’s agent without overwhelming demand for the property can easily frustrate buyers and buyer’s agents, driving them to negotiate on different properties instead.
Compliant negotiators are only ever successful when deals are simple. In this transitioning market, the gap between the expectations of sellers and buyers is bigger than ever. This, mixed with needing to negotiate on a diversity of terms, means most deals are certainly not simple.
To close the gap between expectations, we need agents on both sides working together to solve the puzzle. This is at the heart of collaborative negotiations.
Managing Emotions:
This same gap in expectations means the emotional elements may play a significantly bigger role in the negotiations.
If sellers need to sell for less than they expected or less than their neighbours – they may harbour complicated emotions around that: sense of self, identity, recognition, regret, etc.
For Buyers-the empowerment from the market shift can lead them to be arrogant and bold. In addition, there is an underlying fear of overpaying if the market continues to change. These can combine into uncertainty around taking the opportunity to buy now.
REALTORS who fail to understand and manage these important emotions will have trouble putting transactions together.
Building Trust:
When emotions are complex, and clients are making difficult decisions they need to trust you more and are inclined to trust you less. To gain trust in this market, you need to irrevocably prove that you’re putting their interests above everything else.
Persuasion:
Your skills to persuade in a strong seller’s market were about getting sellers to choose you and agree with your strategy and to persuade buyers to offer a huge price with terms that would satisfy the seller. Not always easy but most people understood the game and could be persuaded to play along as their friends, family, and the media were telling them the same things you were.
This is not necessarily the case now. You may be telling them something they haven’t heard before. A lot of persuasion skills will be going into listing at the right price, price reductions, accepting offers, and encouraging buyers to get into the market. With your sellers, focus on self-interest and sound logic to help them get their house to a reasonable price. With your buyers focus again on self-interest, and uniqueness from the opportunity to purchase unique and special properties, plus the contrast of being able to buy up in a down market.
Advanced Negotiation Workshop