One of the real oddities of life occurs when kids can—simply put—just do stuff. Have you ever experienced this? You may struggle and struggle to learn a new skill, and you turn to the left and see a 6-year-old pick it up and master it in five minutes. Sometimes we chalk it up to the increased synaptic plasticity associated with youth, sometimes we call it instinct. But you might also say that, somewhere along the line, those of us that aren’t kids lost the inherent ability to do some of the things we may once have done naturally. Now it’s time to observe, and learn those lessons once again.
The classic example of a kid’s ability to stump an adult (other than perhaps learning languages and new video games) is a kid’s simple ability to get what he wants. This is not done artfully, skillfully, or even tactfully; rather, kids are successful be means of the bluntest, broadest, but perhaps deadliest tool in the arsenal: persistence. Consider:
CHILD: “Can I have this toy?”
MOTHER: “No.”
“Please? Can I have it?”
“No.”
“But I want it!”
“No, honey.”
“I want it! I want it! I want it!!”
“No! Stop it!”
“I want the toy NOW!!!”
“OK, I’ll get you the stupid toy. Stop screaming.”
Sound familiar? The mother didn’t do anything wrong, but the child did two things right: relied on his relationship with his mother, and refused to give up (despite his repeatedly rejected requests).
This is a skill set many investors have lost, and need to find. Implemented with perhaps a bit more control and precision than the child in the above example, persistence and the establishment of a rapport with your negotiating opponent can be the recipe for getting exactly what you want out of the negotiation. Most investors now realize that negotiating means compromising, and you must be prepared with an asking price and a more reasonable price for which you would settle. But where those investors go wrong is by jumping too quickly to their compromise price. Instead, they should learn from their children or the former version of themselves that sometimes when you ask two, three, even four times for the exact same thing, you might just get lucky.
This becomes especially true when you’ve established some sort of relationship with your opponent (not necessarily friendly, but he shouldn’t hate you going into the discussion). This ensures that—provided your opponent has some degree of conscience—it will be more difficult to write off your repeated requests (just as it was for the mother to refuse her son over and over). If your opponent has no connection to you as a person (rather only as an opponent), it will be infinitely easier for him to simply get up and walk away from you.
The combined effect of this relationship with a bit a juvenile persistence is often your opponent’s—albeit reluctant—willingness to accept your offer. And the difference between achieving your asking price, and settling for your compromise price, is the very difference between being an average investor, and a great one.
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Based out of Indiana, Cliff Redding is a real estate entrepreneur, real estate broker, and property manager with experience in single family and multi-family management.
