One of the most overlooked aspects of skyrocketing your profits when you buy or sell a piece of real estate is hard-hitting negotiation. Your TV is overrun with the latest “Fix your house” television shows. Don’t get me wrong, fixing your home does have its place, but high-powered negotiation strategies will ad thousands of dollars of profits, without you needing to lift a finger.

In this article I am going am going to debunk two of the most costly myths about real estate negotiation. Just knowing a few of my easy tips about negotiation can easily add 1-5% of your homes sales price to your profit. That means on a $100,000 home, using a few simple tips can make you between $1,000-$5,000.

Myth #1 Create a win-win negotiation whenever possible- Can we get real a minute? If someone else wins, then you lose, it is as simple as that. In completing over 130 real estate transactions my goal has never been to create a win-win situation. Instead, my goal is always to create a situation where I win and the other person “Thinks” they have won.

Myth #2 Negotiation starts after offer is written- If you want to lose at least $1,000 on your next real estate transaction, then wait until after an offer is written to lay out your negotiation plan. Masterful negotiation starts the moment you make contact with a buyer or seller. Seeds of negotiation strategy planted early in the process, grow into trees of profit down the road.

Trust me using just a couple of these fool proof negotiation strategies will make your next real estate negotiation seem like showing up to a knife fight using an M-60.

The first thing you should know if you want to learn how to conjugate Spanish verbs in the present progressive tense is that you need two things, the verb estar (to be) for any pronoun in the present tense and the present participle of a verb. For verbs ending in -AR, the present participle is formed by dropping the ending and adding -ANDO. If the regular verb ends in -ER or -IR you add -IENDO. The present participle is the same for all pronouns. Only the verb estar is conjugated according to the pronoun. See example below.

yo estoy viajando – I am traveling
tú estás viajando – you are traveling
él/ella está viajando – he/she is traveling
usted está viajando – you are traveling (formal)
nosotros estamos viajando – we are traveling
ustedes están viajando – you are traveling (plural)
ellos/ellas están viajando – they are traveling (masculine or feminine)

Verbs ending in -IR that change the stem in present tense continue to change the stem for the present participle. Review the following:

1. Verbs changing the stem vowel from e to ie in present tense change the vowel to i for the present particle (ie → i ). Therefore preferir (to prefer) and sentir (to feel) become prefiriendo, and sintiendo respectively.

2. Verbs changing the stem vowel from e to i in present tense also change the vowel to i for the present particle (e → i ). Thus pedir (to ask for) and servir (to serve) become pidiendo and sirviendo respectively.

3. Verbs changing the stem vowel from o to ue in present tense change the vowel to u for the present particle (ue → u). Thus dormir (to sleep) and morir (to die) become durmiendo, and muriendo, respectively.

There are some irregular present participles for verbs such as caer (to fall), creer (to believe), leer (to read), proveer (to provide), and traer (to bring). The present participle ending for these verbs is -YENDO. Their present participles are cayendo, creyendo, leyendo, proveyendo, and trayendo, respectively.

If you are using the Verbarrator Spanish Verb conjugation software to learn this verb tense (and I do recommend that you use the Verbarrator for learning how to conjugate this and other Spanish verb tenses), instead of the “present progressive verb tense,” the Verbarator calls this tense is “estar PLUS gerund.”

Now you know how to conjugate Spanish verbs in the present progressive tense. Be sure to practice daily so that conjugating Spanish verbs becomes easier for you.

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!