What Should Agents Be Focusing On During This Market Shift?

What are two things that your real estate agent should be focusing on during our market shift? Click Here To Watch My Video

Number One: Communication

Right now, if you’re an agent, you need to be an even better communicator and more so than normal, because (YES – we’re always good communicators, we’re making the meetings of the mind happen between the buyers and the sellers and communicating with our clients to make the deals happen); but now we need to be EVEN MORE conscious of the market and what’s happening around us. We need to be much better communicators with our colleagues, we need to find out what’s happening with the level of interest of their properties and their listings; and how much traffic they’ve had coming through. We definitely need to hone our communication skills and reach out to people to get information when we need it.

Number Two: Negotiation

The second thing we need to do as agents is to hone our negotiation skills. Yes, we are excellent negotiators when we’re in real estate, we’re able to get the buyers and the sellers into contract and hopefully have no drama on the way! But what’s happening right now is because we are seeing the re-emergence of contingencies: inspection contingencies, appraisal contingencies, loan contingencies…What that does is that it ‘opens the door’ for further negotiations or speed bumps or problems or something that can happen as you’re in escrow with that transaction. It’s not like buyers are waiving contingencies and then there’s no further negotiation, which is what we have gotten used to in our Bay Area market; but now we’re seeing a lot more requests for repairs or requests for price adjustments or requests for seller concessions, or perhaps a seller credit towards closing costs or other concessions such as credits towards a ‘buy down’ of the buyer’s interest rate. We are now seeing these things happening in our contracts. This means that agents need to be able to guide our clients successfully through these negotiating things that are happening. Not only do we need to negotiate the price, but we need to negotiate anything that happens after the price.