Real Estate For Sale By Owner - Negotiate With Yourself First
Do you really require negotiation skills when you are acting as a For Sale By Owner seller. Well,whilst it’s not a prerequisite a few rudimentary sales skills will never go astray. If you subscribe to the theory that houses sell houses then it could be argued that salesmanship may actually detract from a potential sale.
Some real estate private sale candidates think that there is something magical that an agent has that they may not. In reality many agents would feel more pressure than some owners given that they may have a months wages riding on the outcome of the negotiation.
After all surely someone who really wants your house won’t base their decision on whether you have the gift
Think about it for a moment. The buyer may be thinking that he isn’t happy living a large part of his future life inside the home of a person he took an instant dislike to at the sales inspection. The thought of that could be enough to put some people off whereas others will be more pragmatic.
But I digress because this is an article about sales negotiation skills. I thought I would raise the idea of your likability rating first however as I have seen some amazing things happen when people who inspected a home took an instant shine to the current owner. Resistance to buying melts away and the negotiation process is greatly simplified. So at least make an attempt to be as congenial, friendly and helpful to a buyer as your temperament will allow you to be.
It may not be standard text book
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard - we don’t really need to sell but – or just as bad is – we just absolutely have to sell this
There are subtle ways to get a message of urgency, which is reasonable,mixed in with another message that you aren’t desperate to sell.
It’s all in the words you say and how and when you say them. It’s also about your tone, your body language and even your timing. Some people get tense when starting to talk about money and then they get excited and generally not in a good frame of mind for a successful negotiation. As I mentioned preparation is key in negotiations. You need to know fully well before hand exactly what price you will be prepared to sell for. You need to set that figure in mind and stick to it so long as your research bears out that your property I worth what you are asking. A real lack of firmness or surety on your part will do nothing to further the deal. Play things out in your mind before you are in the real situation of receiving an offer.
It’s no different to an athlete visualizing their event prior to executing it. The key thing here is that you don’t want anything to come as a surprise. You want to rehearse or at least plan how you will react when someone low balls you on price and equally how you’ll react if someone offers more than you had anticipated.
Even trained long serving agents can get to excited in negotiations so don’t worry if you aren’t a master of the game. Certainly the simplest and most effective thing you can do is to know your bottom line. This way you’ll be operating on auto pilot more when the offer arrives. You’ll already have the advantage of knowing whether an offer is acceptable whereas the buyer will be guessing.
A good skill that I have used over the years is to sometimes take the focus right off price just as it becomes the key topic. This can relax many people and help the process move forward. The real skill lies in knowing when to flip the switch, change the subject and let the sales tension melt. Equally there will be times when you may need to up the ante and focus the mind of a buyer who is clearly wanting to make an offer but is easily distracted.
Whatever approach you take you must know where your bottom line is and the time to decide that is well before any sales inspections. Often the real negotiation you have to have is the one with yourself first of all. This means getting really clear on what outcome you want, what outcome you’ll settle for and what a sale at a particular price and in a particular time frame will do for your future.
For those people in Australia wishing to sell privately the author has developed possibly the finest and fairest system of house sale promotion in Australia.
He owns a network of real estate websites which cater to private sales and he also places his clients on many of the country’s largest real estate portals at the same time. More importantly it’s done for a very conservative fee and zero commission
The business is PropertyNow and it operates to market property throughout the country. Andrews contact details are below
Phone - 0408 000 552
( international mobile 61 408 000 552 )
skype ID = andy.blachut
Tags: private sale, real estate private sale, sell house
