5 Reasons to use Keystones to negotiate your onward purchase

However, this is exactly the reason why some clients love the fact that we can take this burden away from them, so if you are curious, interested or already sold on this added service that Keystones provide, then keep reading on as I will give you 5 tips of why it could be a great decision for you to get us to negotiate on your behalf.

Tip One: We Act as a Shield

Moving home doesn’t happen very often in your life, the BBC stated that the majority of people move twice after their first purchase nowadays as opposed to four times (which it used to be) Moving home is ‘becoming a rarity’ – BBC News and Zoopla did a study which stated that people are now moving on average every 23 years. A drastic difference.

Therefore, I think that it is fair to say that moving has become very expensive and when you are negotiating your onward purchase, you need to try to salvage every penny possible to pay for things such as moving costs including solicitors’ fees, surveyors, removals and works once you move in. You never know the state of the house until you have lived there for some time.

When we negotiate on our sellers behalf, we are trained to go in softly and speak to the other agency in the transaction, we can find out information that may be crucial to making the offer and ascertain what the seller of your onward purchase may be willing to accept.

We then report to our seller with a strategy and a plan moving forward, some sellers like us to go in first and try to assess the positions as a strategy before speaking with the agency themselves, while others give us a budget to not go above and we start low without burning the offer.

Acting as a shield or a buffer here takes the emotional sting out of the process. If the onward seller wants £500,000 for their home in Romford and we offer £460,000, then it is the agent that has offered on behalf of our seller and we have advised our seller that this is where we think a good offer would stand, that way if the seller of the house in Romford gets offended it is with Keystones and not our client. It tends to be a great strategy for our clients.

Tip Two: We Can Save You Money

Since we have been offering the service to our sellers, we have simply saved money for them. Another agency might have a lower fee than us but when we are saving our clients between £5,000-£10,000 in their onward purchase negotiations, it is a no-brainier to see the value in what we do and how we do it.

To be truthful, we don’t always save our clients’ money, sometimes it is physically not possible. Especially if there is a sought-after property that has a high demand, and every purchaser has offered. It is very difficult in this situation; however, we tend to broker some sort of positive relationship with the other estate agent so if our vendor does want to pay the money that the onward seller wants, we usually have a good foot in the door to put our seller in the greatest position that we can, then it is up to the following estate agent to accept our sellers offer.

But in most circumstances, we have managed to broker an accepted offer at approximately £5,000-£10,000 less than our seller was originally prepared to offer and this is where we tend to approach the situation without emotion and take a more pragmatic approach.

Tip Three: We Train in Negotiation

The team at Keystones commit to weekly training on all aspects of the business, our values align with the fact that we are never too good to not sharpen our tools, so we attend weekly training sessions including training on negotiations too.

It will never be an entry level team member negotiating your offer for you, it will only be an experienced member of the team, we pride ourselves on a great track record for our sellers and part of that is the training that we provide.

We also are firm advocates of personal and self-development which includes our team working on themselves more via YouTube videos and books.

Tip Four: The Emotion is Taken out of the Equation

As mentioned previously, negotiating your onward purchase is an emotional thing indeed. It is the place where you are going to spend your long winter nights in front of the TV and long summer days in the garden with your family. It is an emotional purchase, and you cannot always put a price on it, therefore, FOMO comes into effect (The ‘Fear of Missing Out!’)

When you enter a negotiation, the person with the most power is always the individual with the most information, also knowledge about the other party and their circumstances concerning the negotiation. What precedes this is the need of the buyer vs the seller and who has the most to lose, it is a negative feeling to miss out on something and even worse to break the news to your family. Therefore, what better way to get an insight into the other side than for the agent to do it on your behalf, a different angle with a different way can give you a whole range of information for you to use before making your final decision.

For example, when I sold and purchased my family home, my estate agency skills went thoroughly out of the window, especially in a buoyant sellers’ market, with hardly any properties on the market, demand being sky high and of course, how could I forget my wife telling me: ‘Whatever you do, don’t lose that house!’
Let’s just say that most of my negotiation skills went slightly out of the window, I was more nervous about FOMO because I didn’t want to let my wife and kids down. More like FOMW than FOMO (I will let you work out what that means 😊)

But this is why allowing someone impartial to negotiate on your behalf takes that pressure off of yourself and places it with someone who has an unemotional standpoint and is also trained to act as the shield, so the negotiation doesn’t get burned at the first hurdle.

Tip Five: We have Proved it Works

Time and time again we do this for our sellers as part of our service and it does work. The majority of agents do not do it, so they have a hard time understanding at first, but it usually starts with a phone call between ourselves and our seller who has seen a property that they want to purchase or at least offer on. We will then discuss with them how much they want the property, and what they are prepared to go to on purchase, if there is a broker we would also discuss proceedings with them and formulate a pricing plan as an initial negotiation.

We need to know how much interest they believe the property has, how their viewing went and any information that they have from their standpoint. We will then discuss with our agency hat on what we think is happening and how we should play it.

Then we speak with the other agent involved and explain to them that we are aiding our seller with the pricing process and that they want to make an offer on the forward purchase, we explain that this is a service that we offer as we want you to know that our seller is serious and has got us involved to help broker the transaction.

This usually goes down well and we start the negotiation process from there. We have great feedback from our sellers and negotiating their onward, plus we have the essence of control in the situation.

We have saved thousands of pounds for our sellers on numerous occasions and it is all part of our service at Keystones Property.

If you want to sell through a professional estate agency in Romford, give us a call at 01708909100 or email us on [email protected]

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