I personally don’t think most real estate investors should bother trying to negotiate Short Sales themselves. Frankly, it’s just too time-consuming for most people and the stress of being put on hold and arguing with the banks’ loss-mitigation people is just too distracting to your overall business. You’re probably much better off finding a service provider who can negotiate on your behalf for a fee.

But if you ARE convinced you want to negotiate your own Short Sales, you definitely want to pay attention to the story I’m about to tell you: “ARE YOU NUTS?!”

That’s what I heard a professional Short Sale negotiators scream into the phone recently. Yep, that’s a direct quote. I don’t advise doing this often and certainly only if you are a skilled negotiator with experience – but sometimes it does actually pay to “flip out and lose it” on the phone. But hold on before you go throw a gasket. When you do this, it should be a conscious and purposeful negotiating decision – NOT because you are just upset and need to blow off steam.

Skilled negotiators manipulate their own STYLE and STRATEGY. You can be strategically adversarial and stylistically cooperatives OR sometimes your style needs to shift to something… shall we say, more combative. However, those shifts into yelling and screaming are the stylistic and purposeful CHOICES of a skilled negotiator. When I heard this negotiator yelling “are you nuts!!” at a lender, I knew he was allowing himself to “get upset,” but I also knew that he wasn’t really upset.

He was making the choice in his negotiation plan that “getting upset” was necessary in order to accomplish a certain outcome. It’s all part of what it is to be a skilled and experience negotiator – they keep their cool, even when it appears that they’ve lost it!