Most of you reading this have at one time or another been personally involved with planting a seed in the ground, waiting for it to germinate, sprout, and grow into a plant or tree. When it comes to real estate deals, what is the seed of a deal? It’s the relationship between a buyer and seller, between someone who has and someone who wants. A relationship must exist so the parties can communicate with each other and share essential information to determine that one is ready, willing, and able to buy, and the other is ready, willing, and able to sell. It doesn’t matter whether the deal is for something as simple as a mobile home or single-family house, or for a large commercial property. It all goes back to a relationship.
What relationship-building activities are you consistently engaged in? How many times a day or week do you send messages by talking with others or communicating through postcards, letters, phone calls, or even text messages, to recipients who have a house they no longer want letting them know that you would be interested in having a conversation with them about how to help them get rid of that house? You don’t want to be pushy or overly aggressive, but you want to be consistent and caring. People want to do business with people they like, believe and trust, and with those whom they believe genuinely care about doing the best possible deal for both parties.
By the time you are reading this, a rather interesting real estate deal will have closed wherein I, representing the buyer, and the attorney who represents the seller, are merely in the position of papering up what the buyer and seller talk about. During the course of this deal and in the closing process, the buyer and seller were probably talking 3-5 times a day about the purchase, transfer, operational changes, etc., of this deal. The deal happened not because of anything a lawyer did, but because of the relationship being built between the buyer and the seller.
In my next article, I will talk about why building a relationship is really important rather than just doing a quick deal and moving on.
