An Easy and Highly Profitable Negotiating Tip

I just finished reading an incredible business book called “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”, by Robert Cialdini. I was so impressed by this book that I now refer to it as required reading for all real estate investors.

The book covers six categories of compliance that you can use to get prospects to adhere to your requests. The categories are consistency, reciprocation, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity.

Successfully utilizing these methods of compliance is extremely important when dealing with motivated sellers. I’m confident that using them on a regular basis will increase the number of houses you buy per year by 20% to 30%. And when you translate that into actual dollars in your pocket, the importance of these techniques becomes even clearer.

One tip that stood out at me most was in the chapter about “Liking”. In short, prospects (motivated sellers) are much more likely to comply with people they like. And there’s a much better chance they’ll like you if you appear to be similar to them. So it’s your job as a real estate investor to appear as similar to them as possible.

A couple of good ways to do this are 1) simply chatting with them to find some common ground, and 2) when you’re inspecting their property, look for anything that might show some common ground … pictures on their wall, golf clubs in the corner, your favorite TV show playing in the living room, dogs in the backyard, and so on.

And start asking yourself … “Do we both have a shared hobby? Do we both like to watch the same TV show or movies? Do we both have children? Do we both share the same religion or denomination? Are we both from the same city? Do we both like to fish?”

Now matter how different you may appear on the surface, there’s always SOMETHING. Next time you’re in that situation, find some common ground, show the seller that you’re just like them, and close the deal!

Until next time, happy (and profitable) investing!

Doug Smith
President
myHouseDeals.com

P.S. Negotiating tips like this are extremely valuable, but they won’t get you anywhere unless you have a good source of motivated sellers. If you haven’t done so yet, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial to myhousedeals.com at www.myhousedeals.com/freetrial. We provide you with 100+ bargain properties each month in 7 different cities. Let us spend the time and money collecting information on these deals so that you can spend your time building rapport with sellers and actually BUYING their houses!