Webinar: Negotiation Under Pressure

Sameer Amini: Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining today's session. Today we're going to talk about negotiation under pressure, and I want to set this up correctly because most people misunderstand what negotiation in real estate really is. When you hear the word negotiation, you picture two people across the table arguing, pushing back and forth, trying to win. That is not what a good real estate negotiation looks like. That is what a bad one looks like. The best negotiators in this business almost never raise their voices. They almost never issue ultimatums. They almost never win by pushing harder.

Sameer Amini: They win because they stay composed when everyone else is just reacting, because they structure moves that gives the other side something to say yes to and agree to, because they use language that keeps the deal moving instead of just stalling it. Now, that's a completely different skill set than most agents are taught, and it is what separates the agents who close 20 deals a year from agents who close 50. That is what we're going to build together in the next 40 minutes in this webinar. Before I continue, my name is Sameer Amini. I am a lead facilitator here at Career College Group. I want to remind everyone that we do similar webinars that are about very interesting, very helpful, useful topics like this for everyone that is in this audience.

Sameer Amini: And in the audience, we have a mix of learners that may not be part of the college yet, haven't started their courses yet, and we have learners that are already in their courses. We do these types of webinars in the middle of every month. In the beginning of every month, we do webinars about the career itself. Is it worth it or not? Okay, let's continue.

Sameer Amini: So let's define exactly what we mean by negotiation under pressure. We're not talking about tactics that you're going to go and manipulate people. We're not talking about tricks to squeeze the last dollar, and we're not talking about anything that would embarrass you if a client saw the playbook. We're talking about, again, composure, the ability to stay clear-headed when a very low offer comes in and your seller is very emotional. The ability to structure a very smart counteroffer when eight other agents are bidding on the same house. The ability to, let's say, reframe a deadlock as a solvable problem. The ability to use language that keeps the deal alive when the other side is trying to kill it or trying to give the ultimatum. So here's the truth about pressure. Every real estate deal has pressure in it.

Sameer Amini: This is always the case. Every deal has a moment where emotions absolutely spike. A deadline comes close, an offer comes in completely wrong sometimes, or someone pushes back really hard. That's not a problem. That's just all part of the job. The agents who thrive in the business are not the ones who avoid pressure. They're the ones who have learned how to work inside it without losing their own footing. That is what we're going to hopefully go through today. Not tricks, just composure, structure, and language makes all the difference.

Sameer Amini: So here's the first mindset shift I want every one of you to make. Most people, including most agents, think of negotiation as a contest. Two sides across the table. One is a winner, one is a loser. A fixed pie, and my job is to take the bigger slice. That framing is the reason most agents lose deals they could have closed. When you approach every negotiation as a contest, you push harder than the situation actually asks for. You make demands the other side can't really meet. You're going to match ultimatums with your own. You turn what should be a professional conversation into a personal fight, and when the deal falls apart, you're going to tell yourself the other side was just being unreasonable. See, professional negotiators think about it completely differently. They see negotiation as a process.

Sameer Amini: Both sides have real needs. Both sides have information that the other does not, and both sides have flexibility on some level that the other side hasn't yet figured it out. Again, the job is not to win. The job is to find the shape of the deal that both sides can say yes to and just get there efficiently and professionally. When you flip your thinking from contest to process, now everything changes. You ask more questions, you listen more carefully, you get creative with the structure, and you close more deals at better terms with less friction, by the way, and better relationships with the other agents you're going to keep running into for the rest of your career. So how do you actually negotiate under pressure? Okay, there are four things.

Sameer Amini: Number one, handling pressure. So what happens when a very low offer comes in and you're on the seller side, or a deadline for the seller is close, okay? Or a client starts to completely spiral. How do you stay composed and make good moves in the middle of chaos? And then number two is structuring the counter. Now, what do we mean by counter? Very quickly, if I send an offer, let's say to you, who's listening to the webinar, and you receive my offer, you have really three choices. You, as the client, let's assume, can refuse the offer, do nothing, and it's just going to die automatically. Two, you could accept the offer, and then here's the third option. You can counter it back to me. You could say, "Samir, you're telling me $1 million. Well, you know what? Here's a counter back.

Sameer Amini: I'm asking you for $1.1 instead." So that's a counter. Now for number two, how you build offers and counteroffers that move more than just the price because price isn't always the case. Now, remember that in an offer, you have multiple variables. Just to give you some examples, you have a deposit, you have the closing date. You have the conditions and terms that go in the schedules of that offer. Number three is managing emotions. Not just your clients, but also your own, the other agents and their clients, because most deals live and die on the emotional layer, believe it or not, not on the numerical one. And number four is clear language.

Sameer Amini: The words you use in emails, phone calls, and in the offer presentations if you're there in person, because language either keeps the deal moving or offends or kills the deal. And most agents kill more deals than they realize just because there was a wrong sentence that was said at the wrong time. We're going to walk through each one of these with real scenarios. So two agents handling, let's say, the same situation. One is being reactive and one is being composed, and you're going to hopefully see exactly where the deal ends up in each of these cases. Then I'll give you the specific moves that you can try and note away from this

Sameer Amini: webinar. This is piece number one, handling pressure in live negotiation. Let me set up a scenario that almost every agent in the business will live through, sometimes multiple times a month. You have a seller, okay, who priced their home a little hot. The market has moved against them. This listing has just been now sitting on the market, not selling. Finally, after weeks of just nothing happening, showing comes in, and after that showing, they bring in an offer, but the offer is low. We call it a lowball offer, meaning it's very low, well below what your seller wants. There's a tight deadline. Your seller is emotional, and you have about an hour to figure out what to do next.

Sameer Amini: Now, this is one of the highest pressure moments in the business, and it is the moment that separates agents who close deals from agents who lose them. Now, two agents handle this exact same situation, okay, in two different ways. So again, same offer, same seller, same market. Let's just see how it plays out for each one of them. First move, you can see Agent A reads the offer and immediately calls the seller and says, "Can you believe this? They are insulting us." The call happens before the Agent A has even taken a breath. The seller, who was already emotional, now has Agent A's emotions piled on top of their own. They now are going to spiral together.

Sameer Amini: Agent B, on the other side, reads the offer twice, once for the number and once for everything else, the deposit, the conditions, the closing date, the other variables. Then Agent B realizes that the deposit is reasonable, closing is flexible There are no crazy conditions, and this is not a bad faith offer. It is a real offer, just the only problem is that the number is not the price. So who do they call first? Agent A calls the seller, the emotional party. Agent B calls the buyer's agent who sent the offer. Not to negotiate, not to make a move, just to gather more information. So they'll call the agent and say, "Hey, thanks for sending the offer over. Can you just help me understand how your buyers got to this number?" Just a question.

Sameer Amini: And that question is going to do a lot of work, and it's not adversarial, right? It's collaborative. You're coming across that you want to work with them, and the answer can change everything depending on who's on the other side. Okay, now the counter. Let's talk about the counter. So Agent A, let's say, counters $5,000 under asking, meaning if they were asking for a specific number originally, the seller, the offer that's low that's come in, Agent A just goes and counters them back just $5,000 less than this asking price. And they say, "Look, take it or leave it." Now, that's not a counter. That's just slamming a door. However, Agent B can counter with real movement on price.

Sameer Amini: Maybe they ask for a higher deposit, they ask for a tighter expiry of the actual offer, and a full package, not just a number, an actual dialogue. So the outcome could be that Agent A's buyer walks, listing sits for five more weeks, seller eventually cracks and reduces the price more than they would have needed to today. On the other side, Agent B could potentially close in 48 hours at a number both sides can live with. Same offer, same market, two completely different outcomes. And remember, when the Agent A's listing does not end up selling and it sits for more than five weeks, it could be that the market keeps going down in five weeks, so the value is actually going even lower than what it would have been that day they sold it. Okay. So what is Agent B doing differently? Four moves, okay?

Sameer Amini: Learn these four, and you are in the top 10% of the agents in the

Sameer Amini: market, and I'm not exaggerating, folks. Move one is the five-second pause. After any hard ask from anyone, wait five seconds before you respond. Most agents fill the silence with the first thing that comes to their mind. The first thing that comes to mind is almost always wrong. Silence is a great tool. Read the offer twice, get a glass of water, let the moment breathe. The gap between the stimulus and response is where the actual negotiation happens. Okay, so remember the five-second pause. Move number two is the agent before the client, meaning when a hard offer or a hard counter comes in on your table for your client, your instinct is to immediately call your client. Don't. Call the other agent first. Get more information.

Sameer Amini: Find out where they're coming from, what their client values, what the story behind the offer is. What can they tell you about the client? Once you've gathered all of that, then call your client with the context and a plan and not just a panic. Okay? Move number three is calibrated questions. This term comes from, again, Chris Voss, okay? He's a former FBI hostage negotiator. If you ever want to look and learn more about negotiation, again, Google Chris Voss, V-O-S-S. So a calibrated question is one that is hard to answer with a yes or no. It shifts the burden of thinking to the other side. So, for example, if I ask the other agent when I call and I get the offer, I say, "How did you arrive at this number?

Sameer Amini: What would your seller need from us to make this work?" Or, "What would your client need from us to make this work?" You see, these questions, they're not aggressive, they're not soft, they're just intelligent. So again, the burden of thinking is placed on the other side. Again, Chris Voss, one of my favorite individuals to kind of learn from. Move number four is notice your own state. On a brutal day with three deals in motion, you're not in your best negotiating mind. You are going to be tired. You might be hungry in that moment. In that moment, you might be frustrated because of something. The agents who never lose their cool are not naturally calmer, by the way.

Sameer Amini: They've just learned over time to spot their own state of being before it makes their decisions for them, and this is extremely, extremely important. Being a manager of an office and helping many, many agents through deals, this is the one thing I've always come back to telling them. "Hey, check yourself right now. Why are you feeling this way?" Right? So we have to always get this out of the way. Let me spend, again, one more minute on calibrated questions because this one skill is probably worth more to your career than any other tactic we're going to talk about today. The idea is very, very simple. Stop asking questions that can be answered with a yes or no. Again, think before the question, okay? Before you ask the question, think. Is your question a yes or no? And try to avoid it.

Sameer Amini: Start asking questions that force the other side to think out loud and share information to you hopefully. Compare two questions, okay? Version one, can your buyers come up on price? Yes or no answer. Usually no. They're going to say no to you. Conversation's done. Version two is, how did your buyers land on this number? It's not a yes or no question, and now the other agent has to kind of explain themselves to you or their client to you. And in that explanation, depending on, again, who's on the other side and how they speak to you, you learn where they got their comparables, what their buyer's ceiling might be, and often where there is room to move, and you'll know if there's room to move, again, depending on how they answer you. Here are a few more you can use tomorrow.

Sameer Amini: What would need to be true for your sellers or for your client to accept this deal? What is important to your client besides price? What is the hardest part of this deal from your perspective? If we could not move on price, where can we find common ground? Let's make this deal happen. You see, every one of these puts you in a position of a professional consultant, not an angling negotiator. The other agent starts giving you information, and the information is what wins the deals. Practice these, okay? Write them out in your own voice and use them on your very next negotiation, even a small one, and watch what happens.

Sameer Amini: So let's go back to the second point, which was structuring counters and navigating the deadlocks. So let's look at the scenario. Now, imagine the market has shifted. Listings are hot. Buyers have to now fight other people, other buyers, to win a home. You are on the buyer side, and there are five other offers on the property, and this property your client really, really likes. This is now a different kind of pressure. It's a different type of role, but the same principle applies. The agent who structures their offer thoughtfully will outperform the agent who just bids high. I want to prove this to you with a real example from my own business in a moment, but first let me show you how the two agents typically handle the situation.

Sameer Amini: Same property, same competition, again, same client budget, very different approaches. So let's talk about pre-offer, okay? Before the offer. So you have, again, two agents, same house, multiple offers. Before the offer, Agent A tells the buyer, "It's going to go over asking. We need to bid maybe 50,000 over what they're asking. There are seven offers today. Let's submit it and let's hope for the best." That is the entire strategy from Agent A. Play one variable, just the price. Now, look at what Agent B. So Agent B calls the listing agent the night before the offer review So remember that when there's multiple offers, for those of you who need some context.

Sameer Amini: So if I have a property for sale and it's a really hot market and I know I'm going to get multiple offers, I might set a specific day and time where everybody can come and submit their offers. So now let's say that Agent B calls the listing agent the night before they're reviewing all the offers. Now they're calling not to negotiate, but just to learn. Such as they could say anything you can share about what your sellers value besides price, any timeline, any closing details that would matter. Have your clients bought a new home already? Have they moved out yet? Most listing agents will share something when you open up that dialogue. Some will even tell you what the seller would most likely accept. They might, or they might somehow give it away or hint it in a way they didn't even mean to sometimes.

Sameer Amini: You see the strategy. Agent A plays one variable, which is the price. Whoever bids the most wins. And let me tell you, that's not always the case. Agent B learns that the seller in this example is someone who's downsizing, meaning they're selling a big home to go into a smaller home. Their family has all moved out and they've already bought a new place. So they need a long closing because their new home does not close for the next three months. You see, without a long closing, they're stuck paying carrying costs on two properties. You see, now that you know that, that information is gold. The offer. So Agent A now let's say, submits 50,000 over asking. Standard everything. Okay, 24-hour revocable, let's say 5% deposit. And they have a condition so they can get approved for financing.

Sameer Amini: Now Agent B submits maybe 40 or 30,000 over asking, 10 or 20,000 less. But they have the three-month closing that the seller would really, really need and a 20% deposit, not a 5%, 20% deposit and no conditions. Or even if there are conditions, maybe Agent B has the condition timelines very tight, maybe two days or three days they need and not five or ten. You see, that offer is worth more to that specific seller than a higher offer of 20,000 even with a one-month closing. Agent A is hoping that their high number just simply wins. Sometimes it does, folks, but often it does not. Agent B wins deals routinely with lower dollar amounts because they're thinking that the offer is not just the price. The offer is a full package with all these different variables that you must fit to what the seller actually needs.

Sameer Amini: Okay, so here's a bit of a story that I want to kind of put together in. So a couple of years ago, I was working with a buyer on a detached bungalow.

Sameer Amini: We wanted to buy a property in Whitby. Five offers on the table. I did my research beforehand. I knew what the property should be worth, so I prepped my client on three numbers that day. I told them what the fair value would be in today's market. So I told them the middle line, what would be considered overpaying. So I gave them the limit to not go over and what would be an absolute steal. So a lower number, meaning if we really get this number, we're really winning. We're a huge winner in this market. So my client understood. Now, before I submitted anything, I called the other agent. I learned that the seller was a senior and they're moving to a senior housing facility. She was either already there or was going to be shortly.

Sameer Amini: When I heard that, I knew that the price was not going to be her biggest motivator. She just had timeline concerns. I also knew that my buyer did not need financing. My buyer was paying all from their bank. They didn't need any loans. So I structured the offer around what the seller actually valued. Okay. My offer was, let's say, 630,000 when the value of the property was around 650,000. But what I did, imagine on a 650,000, I put a $200,000 deposit way above the standard deposit amounts, and we put a 30-day closing, one-month closing. And we even had a condition, by the way, in our offer, which was for a home inspection so the inspector can go and tell us what's wrong with the house. By the way, we ended up winning, so our offer got accepted.

Sameer Amini: The listing agent later on, way later on, told me, by the way, that the highest offer they had on the table was for $670,000. They had another one for $650,000 and we were for 630,000. We ended up winning. Why? Because our deposit guaranteed that we are going to close. We don't need loans and we're going to give you 30-day closing. And again, based on the context, price wasn't important. So you see the lesson in competitive situations, price is often not the tiebreaker. It's the full package. Your offer is a full package and the only way you know what the package or what package will win is if you talk to the other agent and get more information as much as you can. Sometimes the seller might be a celebrity.

Sameer Amini: You might Google and see what's going on with them and you can understand what is really happening if they don't share. So I hope this story and what I'm sharing is helping you understand how this all ties together.

Sameer Amini: So four ideas to make you a better structural negotiator. One, the package counter. Do not move on just one variable, which is the price. Redesign your bundle. You'll move on price, sure, but what about deposit closing date and other variables? Number two is the variable substitution. So when price will not move, change what is around it. Give ground on closing timeline, offer a bigger deposit, tighten the conditions, maybe give them a very tight expiry of the offer. There are almost always at least six variables in play and you want to use them. Number three is talk before you offer and talk after. So before you submit, call the agent, learn what matters. After you submit, call again. Walk them through why your offer is good.

Sameer Amini: Do not let your offer speak for itself when a five-minute call can explain what that paper cannot. Number four, the walk away is real but rarely used. This is your strongest tool, but one that agents overuse the most. When you say, "This is my final offer, take it or leave it." Every time you feel frustrated, your words, by the way, stop meaning anything. So the agents who use walk away powerfully almost never invoke it. So when they do, the other side knows that it is real. So if you say it and you're going to say it's the final offer, then you have to mean it. And if you don't, don't say it. And also, by the way, this does become a bad habit for many, many agents and they'll use it in every situation, not knowing that in that situation they didn't need to use that tactic at all.

Sameer Amini: Let's talk about point number three, which is managing your emotions. This is where most deals actually live or die. Not on the math, but actually on the feelings. Yours, your clients, the other agents and their clients. So let me set up a scenario. You are near closing. Let's say you're near closing on a deal that has been going smoothly. Suddenly a deadlock. Both sides need a different closing date.

Sameer Amini: The seller needs 30, the buyer needs 60, and neither one of them is going to move. Emails are getting sharper. Your client is on the phone every hour. The other agent has stopped picking up at this point. So this is the moment where a lot of deals die. Not because the problem can't be solved, but because both sides get emotional and they just stop looking for solutions. And sometimes, believe it or not, they take it personal, the agents. So let's see how two agents tackle the same scenario. Let's take a look. So Agent A tells the client, "The other side, unfortunately, they're being unreasonable. Hold firm 30 days." That framing does damage immediately. It positions the other side as the problem, positions your client as the righteous one and makes any movement on your side feel like a loss.

Sameer Amini: What you've done by saying that is you've completely trapped yourself. You see, the other agent reframes for both sides and says, "Sounds like both sides are stuck on something that should be solvable. Let me work it." You see, agent B is not blaming anyone, nor is making any party feel right or wrong. It names the problem and leaves the room to move or take some sort of an action. Okay? Now channel, look at agent A. Agent A does the whole thing on email. Tone hardens with every reply. Both agents are getting entrenched. Egos are now getting involved, and this happens all the time. Nothing good is happening, by the way. So agent B picks up the phone, calls the other agent, not the client, not their own client, and says to the other agent, "Let's talk. Just between you and me.

Sameer Amini: Look, what does your client actually need here? And tell me why." Now two professionals are trying to solve a problem instead of two email chains escalating each other with emails. Now let's talk about the move. Agent A stays stuck. Emails go back and forth. Both sides dig in. Agent B, on the phone call, learns that the buyer's own sale is firm and does not close until day 55. They could do bridge financing, but the bridge financing will cost $4,500. You see, now agent B has a dollar number to the problem. Now agent B goes back to the seller and says, "Look, what if we cover their bridge financing cost, and it closes you on day 30?" And that's it. That's all that had to be said. The seller agrees, the other agent takes it, and everybody closes. Okay? See, same problem, two different outcomes.

Sameer Amini: And I'll give you another example. There would be a fight on a chandelier that the seller wants to take, the buyer doesn't want the seller to take, and they're both stuck. Until one of the agents says, "Look, how much is this worth? Let's get an actual dollar number on this. And let's make, once it's a dollar figure, then let's figure this out. Let's see if we can drop it on the price. Let's see if we can have this be credited somehow, maybe half and half. Maybe the hot water tank is worth 5,000. Why don't you guys pay that off before closing and go ahead and take the chandelier?" Right? So you have to think of being a problem solver and not someone who gets kind of pulled in and take it personally. So let me give you the single most useful emotional tool in negotiation, okay?

Sameer Amini: And it's called labeling. Remember this. When the other side is emotional, most agents do one of the two things. They argue. "Your seller's price is unreasonable. Here's why." Or they concede. "Okay, we'll move." Neither works. Arguing makes the other side, by the way, dig in further. Conceding trains them to always push harder next time, and they're always going to win. There's a third option. The third option is label the emotion without agreeing with it. "It sounds like your sellers feel really attached to that number." By saying that, you did not agree they're right. You did not argue they're wrong. You simply named what is actually true, which is that they have a feeling. People will move when they feel heard. They will dig in deeper, make it worse, when they feel argued with.

Sameer Amini: Try this on your next hard call, okay? If anyone who's frustrated on the other side, don't fight it. Name it. "Look, it sounds like this deal has been stressful for you." Okay? Again, that sentence, it might make things worse. So just know your context before you say it, and just watch what happens. So again, label the feeling. Nine times out of 10, they exhale, and then they start talking to you like a normal person instead of a threat. So you want to not be known as a threat to them, and you don't want to speak to them like a threat. Labeling costs you nothing. It just commits you to nothing, by the way. It lowers the temperature in the room faster than almost anything else you can do. So use this when you feel that things are escalating, and they're not de-escalating.

Sameer Amini: So second big emotional move I want you all to remember is the phone call beats email every single time, especially when tensions are high. You see, when you send an email, emails harden. Every reply gets shorter and sharper. Words that would sound neutral in person come across as aggressive on the screen. And so once both sides have committed to something in writing, it becomes much harder to walk it back and take a step back from it. So phone calls do the opposite. Phone calls, they slow things down. They let you hear tone. They let the other person hear yours. They allow for pauses, for genuine reactions, for the small human moments that de-escalate everything. You see, I've personally watched more deals get saved by a five-minute phone call between agents than any other thing.

Sameer Amini: A few phone rules for high-pressure moments. If you're angry, do not email. Okay? Call or wait 20 minutes and then call. If the other agent has emailed you something hard, do not reply in kind. Pick up the phone. If you have to deliver bad news, deliver it live. It lands very differently in your voice than in a paragraph. And remember, the other agent on the other side of the deadlock is also a person. They have a frustrated client, too. They have had a stressful week, maybe. If you treat them as the enemy, you're going to get an enemy. If you treat them as a colleague, someone you want to collaborate with to get a deal done, then you're going to get that person. The temperature in a negotiation drops fast when you change your entire stance and your mentality.

Sameer Amini: There have been times in deals where I've had to literally say exactly what I just said to the other party just to change their entire persona so we can start working on the deal.

Sameer Amini: So let's talk about fourth point, which is the clear language. This is the most subtle and probably the most important. Every word you use in a negotiation is either moving the deal forward or moving it backward. Most agents don't think about this consciously. They speak in habits, and their habits are often killing deals they could've firmed up. So let me set up the classic scenario where language matters most, okay? In the final offer. We call it the final offer dance. You get a counter back. It says, "Hey, look, this is our final offer." Almost none of those final offers are actually final, just so you know. Okay, so remember this from now. If you respond to that email the wrong way, though, you turn a bluff into a complete wall, and now that deal really is dead. So again, let's look at a scenario.

Sameer Amini: Two agents, two very different responses. Agent A matches the energy, okay? The other side said, "Final." So Agent A says, "Final" back. Then we are done here. My client's previous counter was their final position as well. You see, that sounds tough, but it just signals that the negotiation is over. Both sides have now publicly committed to not moving. Even if either wanted to come back, they almost feel like they can't without losing face. Agent B, however, does not mirror this wording that they get. So let's say if they get the word "final offer." Instead, Agent B says, "I hear you. Let me share something that might change the math, okay?" And you want to start a discussion and a conversation. That's not weak, and that's not accepting the offer. That is just opening a different door.

Sameer Amini: And then Agent B references a specific comparable property that sold, then offers a different package, some movement on price maybe, or some movement on the other variables of the offer, and maybe shaping the deal a little bit differently.

Sameer Amini: Then Agent B uses what is called a trial close. "If we could get to this number, do you think your buyers could close in 30 days instead of 60?" I want you all to please remember this negotiation skill. It is so crucial. It is called "if and then." Okay? So I'm not going to say it perfectly, but the idea is, "If we could get this number, then could you..." So if and then. Just remember this. If you could get me something, or if I give you something, then can you give me this? This almost always closes deals. That question, or if you put it this way, it is doing a lot of work, okay? It's not a commitment. It is a hypothetical. It tests whether the shape of what you're just putting on the table would work before anybody commits to it.

Sameer Amini: So if the other agent says, "Let me check," or, "Let me get back to you," Or says yes, potentially. Now Agent B goes to the seller with that exact hypothetical proposal that the other agent just either agreed to or will get back to them. Then the result, if Agent A behaves the way they do, which is they just reply back saying, "Sure, final too. This is our final as well," nothing really happens. But the way Agent B is handling it, there's a high probability that the deal actually becomes firm, and that email that they had that said "final offer" actually was never final offer. We just work with it. Okay, so two different responses, two different outcomes.

Sameer Amini: So the trial close is one of the most useful phrases in your career, and if you're going to learn about it now, before you've even started being in the career, you're going to be ahead of the game. So remember, if we could do X, would Y work? That structure, again, lets you test a deal before anybody commits to it. Both sides can explore whether that proposal would work without either side losing face if it doesn't. So a few examples. If we could get you 850, do you think your sellers would take a 60-day closing? If your buyers could remove financing condition, would your side consider dropping the inspection? Or if we could offer you the bridge financing, could you close on day 30? You see, every one of these is a proposal wrapped as a question. If the other side says yes, you have a framework.

Sameer Amini: If they say no, they usually tell you what would work. Okay? Even if they say no, then a lot of times they have a response on what another hypothetical proposal that they might bring to the table. Either way, you are further along than you were before. Use this often, okay? Even on listing appointments when you're selling, when you're meeting with homeowners that want to sell their property, and offer presentations on closing deadlocks, anywhere you need to test whether a specific hypothetical scenario would work, then use, "If we could do X, would Y work?" Okay. I'm pausing to see if there are any questions. If you have any questions, please drop them in the chat.

Sameer Amini: All right, let's go. This might be the most important slide of the session. So on the left, you have forward-leaning language, words, phrases that keep deals moving, and on the right, you have deal-killing language, words and phrases that end deals, often unintentionally. Notice what the forward-leaning phrases have in common. They are questions or offerings. They put options on the table. They invite the other side to keep thinking. Notice what the deal-killing phrases have in common. They're ultimatums. They close doors. They're shutting things down. They make it impossible for anyone to move without losing face. So here's the rule. Use the left column on the slide. Feel free to screenshot this if you want. Go ahead. And do not use the right column, please, on this slide.

Sameer Amini: Even when you are frustrated, even when the other side is being very difficult, even when your client is yelling at you. Actually, especially then. If you wrote down one thing from this session, write down the left column, please. Put those phrases on a Post-it. Look at them before your next hard call. Over time, they become your default. They become your habits. And remember what we said. When people speak today's real estate world, they're all speaking out of habit. Those habits are either going to be bad, or they're going to be good. So if you start building these great habits now, you're going to be a winning star. You're going to close more deals than the agents around you without ever raising your voice.

Sameer Amini: So one more thing before we close. Everything we talked about today, the five-second pause, remember the calibrated questions, packaging your offer, labeling the feeling or the emotion, phone over email, and remember the trial close, if and then, okay, forward-leaning language, will feel unnatural the first time you try it, but that's okay. New things that you're going to try like this are going to feel a bit awkward at first, but here's the good news. All of these are habits, not personality traits, not talents. Habits. Which means anyone can build them, and once they're built, they're on autopilot. The way you build them is by using them on low-pressure situations first. Practice, for example, calibrated questions with your friends in this week.

Sameer Amini: Practice labeling in a difficult conversation with a family member. Practice trial close on a small negotiation. Okay? Maybe you buy something on Facebook Marketplace, right, or you're asking your current landlord for a repair. By the time a real deal shows up and you're in the career and you're doing real estate moves, these habits have already been built in, and you don't have to remember them. You just simply do them. And again, if you want to deep dive, look up Chris Voss, okay? I mentioned earlier. His book, by the way, is called "Never Split the Difference." It is the best single resource on this material, and it will change how you think about negotiation forever.

Sameer Amini: Let me close with a shift, okay? I want you to take from this webinar composure wins, not aggression, not toughness, not who pushes harder, composure. Every skill we talked about today, from the pause to the label to the trial close, is really just one thing: a way to stay clear-headed when the pressure is on, so you can see the shape of the deal that both sides can say yes to, and you're a little bit zoomed out of the situation. The agents who close the most deals in the business are not the toughest negotiators. They're just the calmest. They're the ones who read the offer multiple times, who call and get information, they ask around, and they never say things like, "Final" or, "Ultimatum," "This is it." So you can decide right now, the start of your career. You haven't even started the career yet.

Sameer Amini: What kind of negotiator do you want to be? The one who wins by just keep pushing harder and burns out inside your first two years in business? Or the one who wins by staying composed and builds a real estate business? So start now, okay, on your first conversations, and compose yourself and read twice, call the other agent. I know, again, none of you right now might be in your careers yet, and you're just in the courses, but this is amazing information for all of you.

Sameer Amini: There we go. So if you want to take some tasks, here are some things that you can note. So I'll leave this slide up for five seconds. Feel free to go and take a screenshot of it. All right. So let me just say again, thank you. I hope this session gave you a completely different way of thinking about negotiation. See, real estate is a business where the more composed you are, the better. You don't want to be the loud one. You don't want to be the aggressive one. So again, folks, if you're currently in a real estate program, a Career College Group, start building these habits now, even before you've entered the career. If you're someone who is deciding whether real estate is the right career for you, I hope today gave you a bit of a taste on the things that goes into this career.

Sameer Amini: And beginning of every month, we do webinars that is focused on is real estate the right career for you or not. Feel free to join. Wishing you all the best. Thank you so much. We'll see you on the next webinar.