The owners want privacy and don't want to be inconvenienced by the sale process, hence we are handling this quietly, off market. If you are not happy with what you are seeing in today's market, please contact me as this a great home.

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We're seeing some very big sales in Paradise Valley this year, and the overall volume is high. With so many transactions underway, it makes sense to revisit negotiation strategy. Below is an excerpt from my book Home Inc. that may helpful to buyers and sellers:

It all starts with what is our Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement? That’s one of the most important questions we can ask. If we don’t know what happens when we walk away from the table, we may stay at the table too long or leave too quickly.

Another important question to ask is, “Who has the greater time constraint?” As you get into a negotiation, people are always focused on the dollars. “Okay, I want X. X is my number, don’t talk to me unless you get me X,” and that’s the mentality that a lot of people have when they go into a negotiation. However, there are a lot of other dimensions to negotiation, and the dimension that may in some cases be more powerful than money is time, and I don’t think enough people give serious consideration to time.

So if you’re a buyer you have to ask yourself: do you have the luxury of taking a lot of time to buy a home? Are you under any kind of time constraint? Conversely, as a seller, do you have a time constraint? Is there something that would be pressuring you to make a move? It’s not just your personal situation, you also want to take into account the market—if market conditions are changing rapidly then time becomes more important for either the buyer or seller, depending on which direction things are moving.

Another question that is valuable to ask: are there other non-monetary considerations on either side that may be significant? This is a very open-ended question and it’s important to think broadly about what, besides money, may be important to people. You want to ask that of yourselves, and you also want to ask it on the other side of the table. If the two sides are really far apart on their numbers, it is sometimes possible to bring these non-monetary considerations into play as a means to meet in the middle.

These are all questions that I like to ask when we get started, and there are a lot more of them I’ll ask over time. I have a whole process, and that is at the heart of the matter: treat negotiation as a process, so there is a method to the madness, so to speak. It’s not about winging it or trying to be a silver-tongued devil to get somebody on the other side of the table to do something that they don’t want to do.

I’m going to gather as much information as possible, and then I’m going to leverage that information to get the best possible outcome. I can’t guarantee a result of X or Y at any given time, but what I can say is I’d much rather go into a negotiation fully prepared with a well thought-out strategy.

Settling on your client’s ideal number may make your client happy, however you may be doing that client a disservice. Maybe the client could get a better number and they don’t even know it. Even if it makes my job as an agent and as a negotiator more difficult, I still want to raise that issue and say, “Hey, you know what? I think you might be letting them off the hook too easy,” and we try harder.

In closing, I want to reiterate the importance of having a process in place. Don’t wing it during important negotiations and leave the outcome to chance. Your family’s home is too important.

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