Last week, I discussed a little about negotiations and how I believe many agents don’t approach a negotiation in the right way.

The summary of my blog was that a proficient agent should have the intention (and some ability) to be able to change the mind-set of a buyer if this buyer makes an offer that’s lower than what the sellers are seeking…and they should methodically prepare a ‘defence’ of the asking price…rather than simply tell the buyers the figure that the sellers are seeking.

I was asked a question on e-mail from a reader….”Do you negotiate in the same manner with your sellers if they are clearly seeking a figure that is too high?” 

That’s actually a very good question.

The best way to answer this would be ‘Not exactly’.

At the end of the day, I’m a firm believer that our sellers pay our commission and as such, we work for them – not for the buyers.

We service our buyers diligently, offer them great service, ensure the transaction runs as smoothly as possible and look after them in every way we can – but at the end of the day, I’ve never hidden behind the fact that we’re there to maximise the dollars that they are prepared to pay.

I can assure you that we don’t collate data in the same way in order to negotiate with our sellers.

Anyone that has asked us to appraise their property knows that we provide a very in-depth analysis of the value of their property before it is even listed for sale and this includes comparison charts of the most comparable recent sales we can find.

If we have a very different opinion of what we believe the value of their property is in comparison to these owners, we’d either not list the property for sale or list it but on the agreement that we’ll work as hard as we can to obtain their price despite this price being (in our opinion) above market value.

Any of our sellers will tell you that we don’t need to have in-depth discussions about the value once we’ve listed it as we have a belief about the value and it’s our job to convince the buyers that they should be paying this figure.

To be honest, our opinion of price is in line with our sellers’ expectations most of the time.

On the rare occasion that we’re receiving feedback that is below our sellers’ expectations (and below our own expectations), we communicate all offers and price feedback to our sellers, but we don’t expect them to take any form of action.

Sometimes I will have a discussion with a seller (that has a need to sell within a specific timeframe that might be quite limited) that the highest offer may be X but we’re hoping to achieve more.

If there are any price reductions on our properties (and there isn’t generally a lot of them), it’s our sellers that instigate the adjustment more often than we do.

In my opinion, every sale is a balance of time and money and every owner has their own unique circumstances so it’s not up to me to determine whether their time/money equation fits with my time/money equation.

I’ve sold a few homes that have taken literally years to sell where the seller wants a certain figure and is not negotiable on this figure in any capacity but they’re happy to wait until this offer comes along…irrespective of the timeframe it takes to secure it.

Some of these sales are the most satisfying to me as I see it as a challenge.

As you probably know, many agents have barely moved past the ink drying on the signed listing agreement and they’re trying to get the price down to a number that is an easy sale and requires little to no work to make it happen.

I believe that this is a short-sighted strategy as the general public have enough data to determine the agents that sell for outstanding prices compared to those agents that just want a quick sale at any price…and my opinion is to do your research on the advertising history on a property and you’ll be surprised how easy it is for an agent’s patterns to become evident.

If there’s history of large price reductions within a fairly short period of time from the property being listed, it’s probably obvious that the agent has told them it’s worth a higher figure just to obtain the listing and then working to bring down the price as quickly as possible to facilitate an easy sale.

Next week…I’ll discuss the big elephant in the room right now – Coronavirus and how this might affect the property market moving forwards.

Until then, Happy Listing and Happy Selling.