With difficult times present, one of the biggest hurdles agents are going to have to overcome is seller expectations. It is your job to help sellers realize that the highest and best offer has been reached and they need to meet the market even though it might be quite a stretch away from their dream price.
However, this is not an easy thing to do. It is a process that should begin as early as the listing presentation. What I mean is that although you are going to encourage their dreams of getting them the highest offer the market is prepared to pay, it is going to come down to a number of variables such as:
- amount of similar stock available in the suburb,
- at what prices these competing properties are being advertised at,
- current buyer activity,
- method of sale the seller chooses,
- media coverage of the market
- and even time of year and season can have a profound effect on the result and days on market.
So, it has never been more important to begin building trust with sellers by educating them regarding all of the above and giving them OPTIONS so that not only are they well informed but have made the decision themselves based on what you’ve presented them.
And it doesn’t stop there!
Educating and providing options has to continue all the way up until the job is done. Not only are you educating the seller, most importantly, you’re building trust as they are witness to you doing everything you possibly can in order to get the property sold.
There are a number of ways you can educate sellers. To find out how, I explain the Communication Loop, a 7-step process to effectively educate sellers and build trust at my Real Estate Brilliance webinar with Ryan Thompson.
When the offers finally start to roll in and the negotiations are underway, they need to be respected and handled personally and in a timely fashion. In boom-time, we had a tendency to only deal with strong offers in this manner and let the softer or weaker offers simmer and only come into effect if we needed them to create a competitive environment. That certainly cannot be the way we handle offers in the current environment.
When the strongest negotiated offer is close to the mark, which would be evident from buyer feedback and other indicators, you are probably still going to find that the seller is reluctant to meet the market. This is when the REASONING comes in.
Remind the seller of why they are selling. Perhaps it is to be closer to a better school, maybe they want to be closer to family, or closer to the coast, whatever the reason is, you need to remind them about how this is going to change their life for the better.
Being able to REASON with the seller of course ties into the reasons why they have decided to put their property on the market in the first place. Sometimes because the transaction becomes a little stressful, they forget the reason they wanted to sell in the first place. A brilliant agent will just gently remind them and reason with them by asking whether $10k is worth putting their life on hold for.
Sometimes it becomes easy to forget that we are dealing with people’s lives and that is the most important part. By simply building trust and reasoning with the seller, you are becoming a trusted advisor as opposed to a nagging real estate agent.
For more strategies on how to educate and reason with the seller, make sure you click the link below to register for my upcoming FREE half-day Real Estate Brilliance webinar. You’ll receive tons of useful strategies, tips, and systems that can be instantly implemented into your business, so register now, what have you got to lose?
