How we bought a house
Negotiating with the agent was the easy part.
Dear Newsletter Friends,
This month I was busy negotiating a real estate transaction for / with my parents, who are preparing to sell their house in New York and move to Boston near me.
Negotiating it FOR them was relatively easy. I will tell you exactly how I did it. Most of my negotiations with the seller’s agent took place over email. Negotiating over email scares people but can be very simple and straightforward.
Negotiating it WITH them — where they wanted to live, the timing, the fraught decisions about aging and health — took all my mediation and negotiation skills, and then some.
Let’s talk about the easy part first.
Negotiation by email: Say what you want. Give a reason. That’s it.
Broaching a subject by email can be tricky. I’ll save that for another newsletter.
But when you’re already in a negotiation, meaning that you and your negotiating partner already agree that you’re working together toward a resolution to your problem, then all you have to do is this.
Hi Seller’s Agent, thanks again for showing us the condo. We are offering $XX, which we believe is a fair price in light of the repairs we discussed.
[After this, I added a bulleted list of the offer terms, and a few questions.]
Start with niceties — you could probably do way better than me, niceties make me tired and I keep them to a minimum. Include some exclamation points or emojis or lots of extra vowels if that’s your thing.
Then, in a very straightforward way, say what you want, and briefly give a reason. Always give a reason when you ask for something. It shows that you are not asking arbitrarily. It explains what you care about in making this decision. And sneakily, it shows respect to your negotiating partner while also making it a little tougher for them to say no.
If you have multiple items, put them in a numbered list. It would look like this:
Hi Seller’s Agent, thanks again for showing us the condo. We would like to make the following requests:
Change closing date to September 30. Would this be possible for the seller? If not, we are also open to closing later.
Please provide a current insurance certificate for our review.
…
Because the seller’s agent and I were both experienced negotiators, most of our emails back and forth consisted of a sentence or two. This style can feel terse and unfriendly to people who don’t spend all day deal-making, but it’s a relief not to have to parse through several paragraphs to figure out what they’re asking. You can make up for the terseness by being warm and friendly in other interactions with your negotiating partner, such as when you see them in person or talk on the phone. (If you have no other interactions, go ahead and warm up your emails. Just make your ask and reason clear.)
Negotiating with family
Some of the issues that came up when all the family members were figuring out what to do, and my lessons learned:
Mediate, don’t arbitrate. When my parents argued with each other, they wanted me to be the deciding vote. (This way they could both be mad at me instead of each other.) I told them, “I’m not going to make this decision for you. You both need to agree. Here’s what I’ve heard so far…” and then summarized both of their key concerns, what they had agreed on up to this point, and what our research had revealed. When they returned to arguing, I would steer them back to the decision they were making. They eventually agreed and no one was physically hurt.
Act, don’t argue. I live in Boston where most of the houses are a century old and all of them are overpriced. My parents wanted modern features at bargain-basement prices. For months, I spent far too much time and energy trying to persuade them to either drop some requirements or raise their price range. They kept pointing to the beautiful professional photographs on the real estate websites, which make the dingiest condo in the dankest neighborhood look like a sanctuary. When they were able to visit and see the listings in person, it took a single afternoon for them to understand the local housing market and adapt.
The next two lessons are ones that I teach regularly to my students and coaching clients, and that I relied upon during this process:
Their happiness is not my responsibility. My job is to facilitate my parents’ decision and make sure their physical health is taken care of. Their job is to decide what they want and need. Whenever I found myself getting too involved in an argument about what they should do, I reminded myself of this and backed away.
Always go back to the big picture: the shared problem we are trying to solve. In this case, the big-picture problem was: how do we keep my parents safe and comfortable as they age? It’s not “should we buy or rent” or “where should we live” or “when should we sell our house” or any of the other sub-questions that we considered along the way. Throughout the process, I kept checking in: are we solving the actual problem, or getting bogged down in sub-questions?
Many more lessons will need to be learned as my parents and I adjust to living a mile from each other instead of our usual 200-mile distance, but those will have to wait for a future newsletter. Also, please drop a comment if you know a good therapist. LOL?