You don’t need to be an expert negotiator to negotiate successfully.  The average tenant-buyer doesn’t negotiate very much.   My goal is to make you a better negotiator than the average tenant-buyer. One thing to always remember is your real estate agent can help you with your negotiations.

So here is another tip on negotiating from my recently released book Rent to Buy:

Ask Questions

You’ll want to do this both before and during negotiations. The purpose is to understand what the seller’s core motivation is. Why are they selling their home? Once you understand their motivation, you can tailor your negotiations towards meeting that need. If you can meet their core motivation (for example, the husband and wife have recently married and they now own two homes and are stuck with two mortgage payments), you’ll find that it will be much easier to negotiate when you can reassure them that soon they’ll no longer be saddled with that extra mortgage payment. This will make it much easier for you to negotiate on points that are important to you.

When you ask questions, practice silence after your question. Let them talk and listen for clues. You will learn a lot more if you zip it and let them talk.

They typically won’t tell you their core need immediately. By listening, you can start to get a better understanding and then can ask a more specific question and use silence again. It usually takes three similar questions before they’ll give you their core need. For example, you might start with the question, “So why are you selling your home?” In their answer they might say something like, “It seemed like the right time.” Not too specific. You can respond by saying, “Oh, did something change to make you want to sell your home?” Then they may say, “Well, we just got married.” Then you can ask, “So you both owned a home before you got married?”

You want to ask them open-ended questions to give them room to talk and give you details. Try not to ask a question that requires a yes or no answer. You can learn a lot by their answers.

Check out Chapter 12 of Rent-to- Buy for more tips on negotiation. If you haven’t picked up your copy be sure to do so today!!

This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Lease Option Student / Rent to Own student, Lease Option Training / Rent-to-Own Training for Home Buyers, Lease Option Training / Rent-to-Own Training for Home Sellers, Lease Option Training / Rent-to-Own Training for Investors, Wendy Patton Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.