I often hear from other agents that buyers in today's market place are difficult to work with, and I can't honestly say that has been my experience. Oh, we always seem to encounter the buyers who aren't really ready to commit but, for the most part, my buyers are delightful, especially the first-time buyers. First-time home buyers make my job fun and exciting. Especially when it comes to negotiating for them.
However, some buyers don't seem to understand that buying a home is a dance, it's a negotiation, not much different from making any other major lifestyle purchase. It's not like walking into the grocery to buy a loaf of bread for $3.50, handing the clerk five bucks and pocketing the change. It involves issuing counter offers and countering counter offers, even sometimes dealing with full-price counter offers.
Every transaction I have closed over the past year has involved multiple counter offers. A seller told me earlier this week that he could not understand how a buyer could offer $25,000 less for his home. I explained that I didn't believe the buyer was looking at his offer as $25,000 less than the purchase price. He was probably looking at it as offering $75,000 more than the home sold for a year ago. Dead silence on the phone. But that's all part of negotiation. It may seem to some buyers that good deals are the low-hanging fruit of the market, but all good deals involve negotiation these days.
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