Negotiations Part 2 | Tips for Home Sellers

Negotiations Part 2 | Tips for Home Sellers

Your house is staged, it’s beautiful, it got tons of views online, and a lot of people want to see it! Now, how do you turn this attention into an offer? Watch my negotiation tips for home sellers to move on with this sale with as much cash in your pocket as possible.

Planning to sell your house? Before you put it in the market, there’s one thing you should know—there are a few critical moments that determine your success or failure. Those moments are doing the negotiation. To help you better prepare for it, here are five things you should know before going into a negotiation.

1. Who are the most interested agents?

First and foremost is choosing the best listing agent to represent you in the negotiations. When looking for a listing agent to work with, choose one who shows the most interest in helping you achieve your goals. If that person isn’t on board with what you want, they wont fight hard to get it for you. When push comes to shove and there are tens of thousands or even millions of dollars on the line, you want to know you have someone who has your back!

2. What is the relationship of your listing agent with the buyer's agent?

Second on my list of negotiation tips for home sellers is to know the relationship of your listing agent with the buyer’s agent. This will help an awful lot in helping you prepare for negotiations.

If your listing agent has previously encountered the buyer’s agent, they will already know what types of offer that person usually writes. Do they usually represent first time home-buyers who are often very hesitant to push the price or remove contingencies? Do they often overpay or advise their clients to go really high and end up setting a lot of price records? Knowing these things will really give you a leverage on knowing how to respond once you go into the negotiations.

3. Nuanced parts of the transaction

It’s usually difficult to predict what you’re going to do in a given negotiation ahead of time. Knowing the nuanced parts of the transaction such as the following can help you better prepare for success during the negotiations:

  • How long is it going to take to remove the contingencies?
  • Did they remove the loopholes in the contingencies? The loophole in 14.B.(5), for example?
  • When do they want possession?
  • Are there any little items they want included or excluded out of the sale? Like drapes and chandeliers, to name a few.

It is very important to prepare ahead for these things as they can potentially blow your sale if you’re not careful.

4. How your agent plans to communicate with everybody during the negotiation

Different listing agents have different approaches when communicating during the negotiations. For example, some agents only talk to the top one and top two offers. Some prefer not to talk to the third, fourth, or fifth place to bring them up a bit with some bottom pressure anymore.

However, this can be a good strategy depending on the situation. For example, if you have an all-cash buyer. Or if all the offers you got are lower than expected but they are clustered together around a value.

Given the latter situation, it will also make sense some times to individually communicate with the potential buyers who wrote the offers at the bottom and start pushing their offers up. After all, somebody could just be holding back to wait and see what happens but turn out to be ready to make a $50,000 jump. I’ve actually seen this happen a lot so make sure to not miss preparing for opportunities like this one when going into negotiations.

5. How your agent plans to counter

Knowing how your agent plans to counter is also really really critical. For example, this often spooks buyers a lot but you can technically counter verbally.

Even if it isn’t official until it is put into writing, making a verbal counteroffer allows room for adjusting the terms until they become acceptable to both buyer and seller. On the other hand, if you counter them in writing and they reject your counter, that offer is officially evaporated.

In the end, choosing the best approach to making counteroffers really depends on who you’re dealing with from the other side. What’s important is to make sure that your agent is really giving you the right information you need. This makes sure you’ll know how best to move forward and make the best decisions given different scenarios.

A few last words about negotiation tips for home sellers

Keep these five tips in mind and at the end of the day, also keep in mind what’s most important—that your offers are your offers. Not your agent’s. You are the one selling your house so you must also have the final say to what gets done or not. Just make sure that you really have all the right information you need to make the best decisions.  


Planning to buy a home? Read my negotiation tips for home buyers here!

I hope this list has helped you. If I can give you more context on the process of buying or selling your first home, please do not hesitate to reach out. My information is below. 

Here’s to all your success!

Need more tips to help you succeed in the East Bay Real Estate Market?

Sign up for Two Minute Tuesday–market updates and stories about East Bay real estate (with the occasional puppy picture) from Hans and Kristin in two minutes, once a month.

Scroll to Top