The Worst negotiations are…

The Worst Negotiations are….

The past fortnight has been an interesting ride for me as I started the process of negotiating for a new property. And also had a separate negotiation with a client go south

It’s been a pretty average two weeks in this space for me.

Now I haven’t had to negotiate on property for about 15 years. And I certainly haven’t done it since I first started learning the art of negotiation.

And I discovered this week that the worst negotiations are those where a third party is involved – and sits between you and the decision maker – which both of these were.

Let’s take buying a property as the example. You are dealing with a real estate agent.
This person is not the vendor. And the one who makes the decision.

And you have no ability to get in front of the decision maker, to ask them questions, understand their motives, read the room, create Win/Wins, move things forward, etc.

You can attempt to get it through the third party agent. But they have a different motive and will tell you whatever they want because they know you are never going to talk to the decision maker and find out what’s the truth and what’s a lie.

And I discovered this week that the worst negotiations are those where a third party is involved – and sits between you and the decision maker – which both of these were.

Let’s take buying a property as the example. You are dealing with a real estate agent.

This person is not the vendor. And the one who makes the decision.

And you have no ability to get in front of the decision maker, to ask them questions, understand their motives, read the room, create Win/Wins, move things forward, etc.

You can attempt to get it through the third party agent. But they have a different motive and will tell you whatever they want because they know you are never going to talk to the decision maker and find out what’s the truth and what’s a lie.

So it makes negotiation hard.

You have even less information to go off, and unless you are a good critical thinker and composed, that information may most likely be false, and tainted with emotive techniques to get you to buy.

So if you have to negotiate through a third party, make sure you get independent evidence of the facts (don’t take their word for it), ask lots of questions in different ways to unravel what is true and what’s not, and don’t assume anything.

So did I buy the property for a good price. No….we found issues with the house that conflicted with what we were told, did further investigating to confirm it and pulled out late. We dropped some cash, but it was nothing compared to what we would have dropped if we went ahead with the purchase and had to fix the issues.