When it comes to buying or selling a home, the idea of having to negotiate can be intimidating. There are a lot of people who didn’t know they have negotiating skills even though every day, they would skillfully negotiate. After all, who takes the kids to school, walks the dog, goes out to pick up lunch, prepares the report, etc? Shall we try to debunk some myths about negotiating?

This is Not Considered Negotiable

Sellers often say to themselves, “This is the deal I’m willing to make. It’s not negotiable.” This doesn’t really mean that there is no room for negotiations. The simple result of anxiety about negotiating is what this is.

Take this approach and you may be chasing away otherwise good potential buyers. The buyer gets into a huff about the seller’s inflexibility and everything goes down hill from there. There’s no need for this happen. Entering into reasonable negotiations is what sellers should be willing to do and just remember that they can say no at any point along the way toward working out a deal. However, they need to ask themselves when each subject comes up, “Am I willing to lose this deal over this point?”

A similar mindset is what the buyer needs to have. The stage is set for successful negotiations when the seller and the buyer are thinking along the lines outlined above, and each acknowledges the possibility of working out a deal in which both buyer and seller come away feeling like winners. What’s unfortunate is that most people don’t think along these lines.

It’s also helpful that buyers and sellers are not always focused on the same things to the same degree. To one person, price may be more important and the time of the sale’s completion may be more important to another. There are times when negotiations are just a matter of balancing things out.

The Typical Pattern

Successful negotiations don’t usually drag on for a long period of time. Usually, there is an offer as well as a counter-offer accepted. There have been many cases when the first offer is actually accepted if it is the result of a conversation between buyer and seller where subtle negotiations took place. When it comes to successful negotiations, they are often concluded with an offer, a counter offer, and a counter-counter offer. It’s usually a sign that the deal is not going to work out if negotiations continue much beyond that.

The minuet of negotiations can go on for quite some time where two people who love to negotiate are involved and there are exceptions to everything as well. However, even in those cases, most of it tends to be verbal with the written sales contract changed very few times.

The biggest point of this article is don’t get intimidated. If you stay objective, you will be able to get what you need from your home.

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