Lesson:
Keep your love to yourself. Put your options on the
table.
In his best-selling book You Can Get Anything You Want , Roger
Dawson, the world-renowned negotiating expert, tells how a
negotiation slipup cost him $30,000 when he was buying his
family's present home. Roger writes that one day while
teaching his daughter to drive in the secluded hills of
Southern California, he spotted the house of his dreams.
Everything about the house was perfect, he says, and it
was for sale.
Posing as a reluctant, if not altogether indifferent, buyer,
Roger relates how he plotted his negotiation strategy - only
to see it evaporate when his wife and daughter returned to
look at the house without him. They oohed and aahed over every
feature, and by the time they were through with their tour,
"they had demolished my reluctant buyers plan,"
says Roger.
It also didn't help matters when his wife told the sellers
Roger really thought their house was wonderful. At that
point the sellers knew the Dawsons were hooked.
With a ticket price of $15, Roger says many people think a
tour of Hearst Castle at San Simeon is expensive. But he
calculated that one house tour by his wife and daughter cost
him $30,000.00.
When talking with sellers, you've got to walk a fine line.
Yes, you want to show interest, develop a cooperative,
problem-solving attitude, and prevent critical remarks that
may offend. Yet you can't go overboard with lavish
praise. Nor do you want to tell yourself, "This is
the perfect house, we've simply got to have it."
In other words, don't shut out other options - either in your
own mind or in the eyes of the sellers. When the sellers
believe you've eliminated other houses from consideration,
they'll naturally use that information to bolster their own
position. Should you tell yourself, "Nothing
else will do," you abandon the strongest
negotiating power any buyer has - the willpower to walk away
from the deal. Sometimes emotions do get the
better of us. But keep in mind that once you relinquish
your walk away willpower, you might as well hand the
sellers a blank contract and let them fill in the numbers.
This Homebuyers Tip was excerpted from:
The 106 Common Mistakes Homebuyers Make, by Gary Eldred,
Ph.D., John Wiley Sons, Inc., 1994.
ISBN# 047131191X
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