Real estate negotiation skills are an essential aspect of success in the real estate industry—and like any other skill, you can train yourself and develop them like a muscle. Whether you’re already a pro negotiator or just a newbie starting out, these five secrets will help you level up and become the negotiator your clients need you to be.
Find A Mentor
Simply put, there’s no substitute for time and experience. Go find a mentor who negotiates the way you wish you could and seek to learn from them. The ways they’ll teach you may vary from person to person, but some things you might expect are shadowing them as they go about their business, role-playing with them to see their tactics and strategies in action, and receiving feedback from them that addresses and shores up the areas where you might be weak.
A mentor should provide guidance and offer insights into what works and what doesn’t in real estate negotiations, so you’ll want to look for someone who is successful, knowledgeable, and has a proven track record. This might be someone on your team or in your brokerage or someone from your market with whom you’ve built a good rapport.
Learn To Balance Confidence And Compromise
Building confidence is essential when discussing real estate negotiation skills, but being confident isn’t enough on its own—you need to recognize when it’s time to compromise. A confident negotiator can stand their ground, but a wise negotiator knows when to compromise to reach a mutually beneficial agreement. When you find the right balance between the two, you’ll increase your chances of success.
This is something that will come more readily with time and experience, but a great place to start is in the self-improvement industry. There are dozens of great books on the art of negotiation that will help you recognize when it’s time to be aggressive and when it’s time to find the middle ground.
Know A Lot
An old adage states that you can’t educate someone past your own level of knowledge. What you do or don’t know is huge at the deal-making table. You’d better know your stuff if you want to get ahead in real estate negotiation. Skills are really just applied knowledge. If you aren’t coming to the negotiation table with as much or more knowledge as the person on the other side, you’re disadvantaged. Become the expert and your real estate negotiation skills will increase.
Be An Active Listener
Active listening is a necessary skill at every level of a transaction, but one that also finds extra power as you consider your real estate negotiation skills. Careful observation gives you an edge—from applied knowledge that offers new solutions to noticing opportunities to gain ground, your ability to listen and internalize what is being said will pay off time after time. There’s not much to this practice aside from just that—practice! Get out of your own way and pay close attention to the party opposite you.
Practice, Practice, Practice
Finally, the key to mastering real estate negotiation skills is practice. This can happen through many avenues, but here are a few to consider: role-play with your team or other agents, learn new scripts and talk tracks, shadow agents in your brokerage, and sleep, eat, and breathe negotiation materials. Every time you make a deal, take notes about how it went. If you measure it, you’re bound to improve faster than if you don’t.
Mastering real estate negotiation skills takes time, effort, and dedication. By finding a mentor, balancing confidence and compromise, knowing a lot, being an active listener, and practicing regularly, you can level up your real estate negotiation skills and become a successful negotiator faster than the next person. Don’t despair if a deal or two goes south while you’re on your way to mastery—that’s just the price of entry.
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