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A Negotiation Tactic for Sacramento Realtors Dealing With Unreasonable Demands
Sellers deserve a Sacramento Realtor who is fearless with strong negotiation skills.
Whenever I am faced with a dilemma, the way this Sacramento Realtor works her way out of it — as hokey as this might sound to some of you — is to consider my fiduciary duty to the client first. Forget what I might think or what the other parties might want, which negotiation tactic is best for my seller? The answer is almost always crystal clear at that point. That’s a little secret I pass along from me to you. It keeps things more simple when focused.
Notice I didn’t say it makes my job easier because much of the time it doesn’t. The negotiation that is best for the seller almost always involves extra work and it can be complicated. Not only that, but I can’t go around making unilateral decisions without my client’s acknowledgement and permission. It’s not my house nor my transaction. That’s a good point to remember. As a Sacramento Realtor, you can’t get too wrapped up in somebody else’s situation that you start to make decisions for them. Because that would be bad.
It can be a fine line to walk. To want to protect your client and negotiate what is best while at the same time not making the decisions for your client. It’s in the approach though. I’ll give you an example that happened a few days ago on a home that just closed escrow on Friday.
The buyer’s agent has had terrible experiences in the past with tenants, which might have clouded his judgment somewhat. Although this home was not tenant occupied, he felt the family who lived there acted like tenants, and that was enough, probably through transference, for his buyer to submit a Request for Repair asking for the squeaky front door to be unsqueaked and a minor hole in the closet patched. The buyer asked for a few other things, including shampooing the carpet, and he tried to force the family to move prior to closing.
While we were pondering how to respond to this unreasonable request at the 11th hour, the agent hit me with an email to say he also decided they would prefer to close escrow on Monday and not on Friday. Our purchase contract stipulated a closing on Friday. The seller was about ready to agree to credit a small amount of money to the buyer to compensate for his anguish over the squeaky front door until the buyer’s agent came up with an additional demand.
At that point, the seller rejected the Request for Repair outright. In addition, I mentioned to the seller we should submit a Demand to Close Escrow because the buyer appeared to require a kick in the seat of his pants. She wasn’t sure what that meant, I suspect, but she agreed to the negotiation. You really can’t renegotiate a contract, I explained to the buyer’s agent, without an agreement from the seller, and while I could not speak for the seller, I had a suspicion she would cancel the contract if they tried.
The best way to cancel a contract is to first send a Demand to Close. The buyer’s agent forced us to produce it. That negotiation tactic was the best protection for the seller. The seller has less to lose than the buyers, I pointed out. Now the home would be vacant, making it easier to show, which means we would get more showings and, in our tight market, probably a higher offer. Yeah, let’s go back on the market.
Painful to say, but the right negotiation for the seller.
We closed escrow on Friday on time. No Request for Repair, either.
When a Sacramento Realtor focuses on the negotiation that is best for her seller and takes herself out of the situation, the solution is apparent.
Closing an Escrow Against the Odds
I may have been riding ponies and yelling giddy-up last night but this morning my birthday is over and I’m just another old fart whose day of glory has passed. No more 20-year tawny for me today, me — who had the brilliant thought that if one glass was a fine way to end the evening, a second glass might be even more fun. Instead I have built-in radar that says, nope, you, young lady, need to go directly to bed, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Put that head on the pillow, NOW.
I am thankful for my built-in radar because it keeps me out of danger. I have pretty good gut instincts as well which I, at times, rely upon. It’s the reason we closed an escrow on Friday that probably would not have otherwise closed this month.
This was a transaction initially scheduled to close within the first week of June, not the end of June. Mid stream, the mortgage lender switched the financing from conventional to FHA because the buyer did not qualify. The underwriter discovered a foreclosure on record some 7 years past for one of the buyers and disqualified the buyer. Yup, guidelines can make provisions for waiting periods but underwriters can do what they want.
Then the file sat at the lender because everybody thought somebody else was working on it, or at least that’s the mortgage lender’s story and he was sticking to it. He went so far as to pull out the my-grandmother-died card, or wait, that might have been another transaction and these are probably guys without grandmothers, I may note. I dunno. What I did know was I had a very unhappy seller due to the financing for the buyers. She expected to close. She had to make another mortgage payment she wasn’t planning on making. She asked me for options.
The solution she liked best was to sell the home to another buyer. So that’s what we did. We signed a back-up offer with a second set of buyers and issued to the first buyer a Demand to Close escrow. The buyer’s agent was horrified. Said she had never received a Demand to Close escrow in all of her years in real estate. It won’t be the last, I offered. Not in this real estate market. The lender has the ability to make any file a priority, and it may as well be ours. They managed to pull a rabbit out of the hat and closed.
