A few months ago I read an article by a man who teaches people how to negotiate. He travels all around North America hosting seminars where he teaches people how to do this more effectively.

What really got me to smile was when he described what he always experienced when he'd have a group of attorneys in the room in front of him. This would happen when a law firm would hire him to teach their attorneys to become more effective negotiators.

In these situations, he'll typically have the attorneys pair up with each other and give them a scenario to role play, each trying to successfully negotiate with the other attorney. This happens with all the attorneys participating in the process with a partner at the same time in the room.

And as he describes it, almost universally from the moment he gives the command to start the process, the room immediately fills with the sound of attorneys aggressively trying to force their own position, and opinion down the other person's throat.

Are you smiling, too? Having spent my 20 years as a real estate agent and manager in Los Angeles, this was often my experience when negotiating with attorneys. And then I finally realized, "These guys are getting paid by the hour, which means they're going to make about the same amount of money whether or not my transaction closes." With this I then realized that attorneys, often seem to believe that being a good negotiator means playing hardball and being extremely inflexible with the other side. But for me as a real estate agent, with my income dependant on successfully negotiating transactions that closed, I realized that I didn't have this same luxury. So I had to become an outstanding negotiator -- with my clients, my prospects, and their attorneys.

The people who become the best negotiators are the ones whose income and quality of life depends on it. When you recognize you won't be getting paid unless you successfully negotiate through obstacles, you realize you'd better find a way to become good at it.

Top real estate agents recognize this, and they become masters at negotiating. They know that obstacles will often come up in transactions, but they become incredibly adept at finding solutions to these problems and moving their transactions forward.

Becoming a master at negotiating means being an expert at creating rapport with people so they trust both you, and the solutions you propose to them. It's about proposing solutions that enable both sides to win. And, at the same time, top real estate agents can become so good at negotiating that they often appear to be closing a great many transactions effortlessly. This is only because they've become so highly skilled at moving people through obstacles that they appear to be doing it easily.

In closing, very few people in the world become as skilled at negotiating as we do in our real estate businesses. Our lives and incomes depend on this, and the better we become at negotiating, the more successful we become in other areas of our lives, too.

Published: March 4, 2005

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Jim Gillespie, Ph.D., is America's Premier Real Estate Coach℠. He has over 20 years of experience in real estate sales and is a past president of three different real estate companies. His FREE real estate E-newsletter with tips and creative ideas to help agents make more money is now read by over 35,000 agents nationwide. You can subscribe to his FREE E-newsletter by visiting RealEstateSalesCoach.com or contact him at Jim@RealEstateSalesCoach.com.