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Buyer Tips
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"We Fell
in love with the house and just HAD to have it."
Lesson:
Keep your love to yourself. Put your options on the table.
In his best-selling book You Can Get Anything You Want , Roger Dawson,
the world-renowned negotiating expert, tells how a negotiation slipup
cost him $30,000 when he was buying his family's present home.
Roger writes that one day while teaching his daughter to drive in the
secluded hills of Southern California, he spotted the house of his
dreams. Everything about the house was perfect, he says, and it
was for sale.
Posing as a reluctant, if not altogether indifferent, buyer, Roger
relates how he plotted his negotiation strategy - only to see it
evaporate when his wife and daughter returned to look at the house
without him. They oohed and aahed over every feature, and by the time
they were through with their tour, "they had demolished my
reluctant buyers plan," says Roger.
It also didn't help matters when his wife told the sellers Roger
really thought their house was wonderful. At that point the
sellers knew the Dawsons were hooked. With a ticket price
of $15, Roger says many people think a tour of Hearst Castle at San
Simeon is expensive. But he calculated that one house tour by
his wife and daughter cost him $30,000.00.
When talking with sellers, you've got to walk a fine line. Yes,
you want to show interest, develop a cooperative, problem-solving
attitude, and prevent critical remarks that may offend. Yet you
can't go overboard with lavish praise. Nor do you want to tell
yourself, "This is the perfect house, we've simply got to have
it."
In other words, don't shut out other options - either in your own mind
or in the eyes of the sellers. When the sellers believe you've
eliminated other houses from consideration, they'll naturally use that
information to bolster their own position. Should you tell
yourself, "Nothing else will do," you abandon the
strongest negotiating power any buyer has - the willpower to walk away
from the deal. Sometimes emotions do get the better of us.
But keep in mind that once you relinquish your walk away willpower,
you might as well hand the sellers a blank contract and let them fill
in the numbers.
This Homebuyers Tip was excerpted from:
The 106 Common Mistakes Homebuyers Make, by Gary Eldred, Ph.D., John
Wiley Sons, Inc., 1994.
ISBN# 047131191X
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