Try not to roll your eyes too much when I say this: I was scared shirtless of seller negotiation for YEARS. It’s absolutely true: I have a constellation of nature and nurture traits that make my choice of professions kind of hilarious.

I’m waaaay on the end of the introvert/extrovert bell curve. My Meyers-Briggs profile is INTP. My DISC test says that my “I” is a 25 out of 100. If you don’t know what any of that means, it means that I am naturally extremely introverted.

Add to that the fact that I have a tendency to get very anxious over uncertainty—I try to run every scenario and every outcome mentally before I do anything—and you don’t exactly get a recipe for someone who’s a “natural negotiator”.

In the beginning, before I really understood seller psychology, or how to deal with the objections they throw out to offers, or, for that matter, how to deal with rejection without feeling like I must have messed up somehow, I literally lost, I don’t know, hundreds of deals to the fact that I couldn’t get out of my own head long enough to actually tell sellers what I’d like to pay them for their houses.

Drew LOOOOVES to tell the (sadly, true) story of my negotiation strategy back then: I’d talk to a seller on the phone, make an appointment (often without really knowing what the seller’s bottom line was), go see the property, then tell the seller I’d have to get back to them with an offer.

Then—and here’s the part that makes me blush now—I’d go home, write an offer, and sneak back to the property at midnight to put that offer in the seller’s door, so I didn’t have to so much as hear an objection.

Yeah. Sad. I know.

But obviously, I’ve gotten over it.

Now, I LOVE talking to sellers on the phone and in person, and working out crazy (and profitable, of course) deals that works for both of us…and I no longer spiral for even a minute when a seller tells me no.

It took 10 years for me to wrap my head around how to do that, and to come up with comfortable ways to tell sellers things like, “Yeah, I know that Zillow told you your house is worth $250,000, but all I can give you is $130,000, unless you’ll take payments at no interest for 10 years, in which case I can do $160,000” [that’s not the way I’d say it, BTW].

What happened during that decade that made took me from a terrified negotiator to an excited one?

1. I studied how successful real estate negotiators talked to sellers, and found out that it’s much more of a directed conversation than the aggressive, confrontational event that I thought negotiation was
2. I adapted their words to my comfort level so that I felt and sounded natural while saying the same things in different ways
3. I practiced a lot—on sellers, on my partner, on anyone who would role-play with me

If negotiation doesn’t “come naturally” to you—if you dread it, feel uncomfortable doing it, or always leave feeling like you did a bad job, I’d recommend doing what I did: realize that it’s really important in the real estate business, study successful people, and practice every chance you get.

P.S. If you’ll let me, I think I can cut, well, about 9 years, 11 months, and 29 days off YOUR learning curve ..because I’ve gathered everything I wish I’d known and every tool I use to negotiate with sellers into a one-day online class on Saturday, March 25^th.

It’s way cheaper than the last time I taught it (thanks to the miracle of Zoom!), and even cheaper when you register before March 23^rd.

Get the details and get registered HERE.