Long Term VS Short Term Negotiation

Hey y’all, Maxwell Baker here. I wanted to talk to you guys today about long‐term versus short‐term negotiation.

Now in a nutshell you can kind of guess what I’m talking about. In working with brokers like myself, or working with sellers like our clients and other buyers, and really pretty much even your spouse, the long‐term game is the way to go. It gets you so much more benefits on the long‐term. You have to wait for it, and sometimes you get hammered, I mean, that’s just the way it is.

So I want to talk to you guys about how to think long‐term when it comes to working with brokers and sellers and why it’s important.

Now, let me back up a little bit. If you foresee doing a lot of transactions with somebody you want to think long‐term. If you don’t foresee a lot of transactions, then you probably can get away with thinking short‐term. Long-term, for me personally, I enjoy that better because you just put out Good Vibes into the world, and people like working with you. And if you’re easy to work with you’re going to see more deal flow.

So let me give you some examples.

If you’re a newbie buyer coming into the mobile home park industry set expectations that tell a broker, “Look. I’m new. I need a little bit of help here.” Get your financing in order. Get your money in order. Get your business plan in order. When you come to a broker that doesn’t know you it’s very important to (even pretend if you don’t) have your stuff together. Your financing, your money, your business plan, and really your resume through the history of what you’ve done. If you’re a new buyer coming to me or one of the agents on our team and you say, “look this is what it is, I want to be able to work with you guys and develop a relationship”, with a phone call – no emails, phone calls now – we’re going to pay attention. You’re going to start seeing deal flow that nobody else is going to see. Even if you’re a first‐time buyer.

Now, we just sent out a deal here in Georgia and we got about, during Coronavirus time, 20 calls in one day off of this one eblast, which is crazy. This deal never got this much activity before, like I said. And we had one guy or girl, I won’t say who was, came in and just started barking at us. Like, “this is what I’m doing. This park is not any good” and like well, we got 19 other buyers that are a lot easier to work with. They’ve already submitted the proof of funds, they’ve submitted who their lending relationships are. We’re going to pass just because at the end of the day, we all enjoy our job. We all enjoy working with people that are like us. And we try to say that we’re nice people. So we like to work with nice people.

So those people are going to get the most amount of deal flow.

The people that are short‐term deal centered, they don’t give any hoots about what you’re telling them, they feel like they’re know‐it‐alls, fast talkers, talk over you. Albeit if it’s a tough deal to sell a lot of brokers including myself will deal with that. That’s what we do. We deal with people that, you know, sometimes the sellers don’t want to deal with. That’s why I hire brokers as a mediator to be a buffer between them and some of these characters out there.

So long‐term over short‐term. It’s important for you guys and girls to always think long‐term when you’re dealing with sellers or brokers because you never know when the next deal is going to be there. You never know when you’re going to need something from that seller or that broker. Like you always want to be paying it forward, you know, sometimes if you need to take a hit in the chin just to get the deal done but you know it’s a good deal anyways, I think it’s important for you to do that.

You have these people that think short‐term that are negotiating all the way to the closing table, always after your earnest money, that are always trying to set the contract in the terms of the agreement that they put together to just try and take away their earnest money. It’s a strategy. People are always saying if you can get the other adversary or other negotiating side to get their time, energy, money, emotions, involved in the transaction the higher probability they’re going to actually close. So a lot of people negotiate that way on a per‐deal basis. It’s a good strategy but long‐term wise people are not going to want to work with you. It’s very difficult to want to bring off‐market deals to people that negotiate that way. I mean, it is what it is.

If you guys and girls have any questions, give us a call: 678‐932‐0200.