“I’M PULLING OUT!!!”

Although on paper it says I deal with buildings, my business is actually people related. It’s therefore essential to learn about the common behavioural patterns in certain situations and to understand how best to deal with those. Being prepared helps to sometimes diffuse a situation before it spirals out of control.
 
There is one trait that appears more than any other. It is the reaction to the stresses and strains of the moving process, which I am fully aware is highly testing, that cause client after client after client to threaten to withdraw from the sale/purchase.
 
A good estate agent will normally have 40 – 60 sales proceeding at any one time, potentially upwards of 120 very stressed individuals. It’s not uncommon for at least half of those sales to have one individual within the chain insisting they will pull out if their demands aren’t met.
 
I’m not unsympathetic to the kind of helpless feeling you can get whilst waiting for others to do what you think they should be doing that causes the ‘toys to go out of the pram’ but I do know it very rarely serves the intended purpose.
 
An agent who manages the sales process requires, beyond all other skills, a level of diplomacy like you wouldn’t believe. It can be just as stressful being the buffer between 2 individuals in that sale, so you have to quickly learn not to take things personally. We also have to find a way of delivering the comments of highly frustrated clients in a manner that makes them appear reasonable requests to the other party.

For those of you currently going through this stressful process, my advice would be to work with your agent to try and look for solutions with a level of compromise. Pulling out is an overused threat that in almost all cases does not carry the weight you might imagine it would. Instead of helping to move the process along, it tends to have the opposite effect.
 
If you’re considering putting your home on the market, having an estate agent who will work with you during the more stressful times will definitely be an asset. Just one more reason that you might like to try Imagine....