Positive Results

Cementing a deal has to begin with your first conversation with a client. There’s a method to our madness in the short sale business, and this conversation is right at the core.

If you have been in sales for any length of time, you know that you need to identify the needs of your client and narrow down what is really important to them. Once you establish those personal needs, your job is to create a solution to fill that need while achieving your end result. That’s a pretty universal strategy.

In the short sale niche, our clients are homeowners in distress. Generally speaking, their problems are obvious, right? They’re losing their home, and they’re drowning financially. Specifically, though, not everyone has exactly the same mindset about their needs during financial troubles. If you want to work with these homeowners, you need to hit home about what is really bugging each of them personally about their situation. Read this post about managing the emotional side of foreclosure, if you haven’t already.

Once you get to the emotional root of the problem, you can focus on creating the solution that will help them the most. As you’re listening to them talk about their problem, you need to be looking for that win-win somewhere in that awful situation. There is usually a win-win there for both you and the homeowner. Your job is to find it, and then help them see it.

You’ve been listening to them for a while, and you now know their story. (If you’re smart, you’ve been letting them do most of the talking.) When they’re done - and only when they’re done - you need to talk about how working with you is the right solution to their problem. That’s where the Positive Results Conversation comes in.

The Positive Results Conversation allows you the opportunity to explain who you are, what you do, and how you might be able to help. You, as a real estate investor, are educating the homeowner about their options and alternatives to foreclosure. You can find my discussion of foreclosure options here.

Once you have gone over the options, the next step is to educate the homeowner about the short sale process. As short sale negotiators, we know that a short sale is the option that best minimizes the damage to the homeowner’s financial life, but most people don’t quite understand how everything works - and some people are very suspicious of things they don’t understand. That’s why we also talk about setting expectations.

Expectations are everything when you are working with homeowners are in foreclosure. If they know what can and can’t happen, they’re less likely to be suspicious of anything during the process. Managing expectations is the real key to making the Positive Results Conversation work for you. You’ll have more trouble than you know what to do with if you leave this part out of the conversation and then have to explain something crazy that happened later.

Finally, don’t try to wrap up the conversation before they hear everything, even if the seller asks you to. There is a reason that each one of your talking points is in your presentation, and you will do the homeowner a great disservice by leaving out part of it. You need to make the entire presentation for them to give your offer and your solution the full value it deserves. Without that, it will be much easier for the homeowner to cancel the deal for minor reasons or a slightly better offer coming along from the bank or one of your competitors.

Bring your own personality to the table, but stick to the script and keep the conversation under 90 minutes. By the end of your presentation, the homeowner should be able to see some positive results already: there is a knowledgeable professional in front of them who is willing and able to help, and there is a solution to their problem besides running away from it and watching what’s left of their credit rating go down in flames.

Want to know how it works? You can read the entire Positive Results Conversation in our original Short Sale Manifesto. There is a whole list of topics that need to be covered, but if you go over each topic with the homeowner, we can guarantee from experience that you’ll see positive results on your end, too, and you can begin to gather the materials for the short sale package that you and the homeowner will need to submit to the bank.

Remember that this is a presentation we put together from experience. Everything in our Positive Results Conversation is specifically geared toward short sale success, and it has been proven to work over and over again. How will you really know when you get positive results? In your local market, you will become the one that people think of when they need someone who can solve tricky situations with problem properties. Your neighbors will know you as “the short sale expert”!