What are the keys to a successful negotiation? Here are our tried and true philosophies for negotiating a great price and great terms on the sale of your home.
Our six negotiation tips for sellers
1) Create a beautiful real estate listing.
One of our first goals early on in the listing process is to create a solid partnership between you, our stager, our photographers, and our creative team. Working together, we create a beautiful real estate listing with eye-popping photos and plenty of marketing materials which highlight the benefits of your home. Beautiful listings receive more online interest, more showings, and more offers - all of which give you more leverage when it's time to negotiate.
2) Ensure your listing receives full exposure to the market.
We also want to make sure you don't leave money on the table by selling your home too quickly to the first buyer who tours your home. Instead, we ensure all interested parties have time to view your home, ask questions, and submit their offer. Our goal is to attract multiple offers and negotiate with multiple buyers, rather than receive one offer and negotiate with just one.
3) Over-communicate will all parties.
When an offer is received, we reach out to all interested parties to let them know an offer has been submitted for your home. This gives all interested buyers a heads up that they still have time to submit their offer and compete for your listing. By over-communicating will all interested parties, we ensure no offer goes unwritten.
4) Vet the buyers.
We like to vet the buyers and learn more about them and their interest in your home. Very often this means we're calling the buyer's lender to verify the buyer is financially solid and well-qualified to purchase your property.
5) Ask these 2 important questions to buyer agents:
- Why did your client choose to write an offer on this listing?
- Is there anything else about the buyer that the sellers should know?
Engaging the buyer agent in a conversation and asking these two open-ended questions helps us better understand the buyer's level of interest in your home. For example, with one of our recent listings, we learned an interested buyer had missed out on 6 other properties before submitting an offer on our listing. Because we engaged the buyer agent in a conversation, we learned this buyer was extremely motivated to get their offer accepted. Once we had this information we knew we had found the right buyer. At that point we also knew we had plenty of room to negotiate this buyer's offer to our client's benefit.
6) Be kind and helpful to all parties.
Throughout the negotiation process we prefer to "advocate without being adversarial". We help buyers and buyer agents get all of their questions answered quickly, and we keep the tone of all communications upbeat and positive. Buyers and buyer agents are more willing to negotiate with a kind and helpful listing agent than one who communicates infrequently and plays the role of "tough negotiator".
Do you have questions about selling your Madison area home in the coming year? Reach out to your favorite Mad City Dream Homes real estate agent for a quick conversation. Also, please check in regularly with our home-sellers blog. We'll have a lot of great information to share with you in the year ahead.
