Kaya Wittenburg is the founder and CEO of Sky Five Properties in Miami.

Every week, we ask a real estate professional for their Short List, a collection of tips and recommendations on an essential topic in real estate. This week, we talked with Kaya Wittenburg, CEO of Sky Five Properties. 

Some conversations are a lot more valuable than others. For crucial conversations, it’s important to be at the tip-top of your game. Preparation, focus and an acute attention to detail will go along way towards winning when the stakes are the highest. As real estate professionals, our words are important tools in our day-to-day business operations. Keep them sharp and you’ll be a highly effective communicator. Here are my top recommendations:

5. Write Before You Speak – Strong communicators are rarely caught off-guard. To inoculate yourself against being lost for words, prepare for critical conversations in advance. Write out your main discussion points by hand and have them in clear sight during any phone conversations. At the bottom of the page, write your objective in large print and circle it.

4. Provide a Clear Direction – Effective communicators know that there is a natural flow to conversations that make them more digestible. If you have an important situation to describe, you’ll want to start out with a general overview of the situation. I call it the 30,000 ft view. By starting in that fashion, your audience will understand your point/objective immediately and won’t struggle to follow you. There is nothing more frustrating than listening to someone that is speaking in circles without a clear direction.

3. Drill Down from General to Specific Thoughts – Once you get into the meat of your discussion topic, drill down from the general to the specific. For example, you’d want to first discuss the general state of the real estate market in Miami prior to discussing the micro-market of sales trends within a condo building. One impacts the other, but not vice versa.

2. Avoid False Steps – Know the motives of your audience in advance through either savvy research or asking directly. Football players use a term called false steps; you don’t want to place emphasis on something meaningless or insignificant to your target audience. Those conversations are false steps that dilute your effectiveness. False steps delay you from getting to the goal line and open you up to a hard hit.

1. Exert Your Will – Have confidence in what you know and make a point to exert your will every day in every conversation. Lately, I find myself navigating through some complicated conversations between ultra-powerful developers. They both put their pants on one leg at a time, just like me. When they call on my opinion, I deliver it. I exert my knowledge and will without hesitation. The same principle holds true for you. You are the master of your deals – be fearless and make an impact!

Kaya Wittenburg is one of the world’s top sales and marketing strategists for urban and destination resort real estate developments. Through skillful management and an energetic global vision, Kaya has supervised the sale of over $4,000,000,000 in gross sales revenue since 2004. His teams have been widely recognized for their knowledge and work ethic. Kaya’s business acumen is extensive and has steadily evolved functioning as a sales associate, project manager, broker and top-level executive. In 2013, Kaya founded www.skyfiveproperties.com dedicated to serving as the premier commercial and residential brokerage firm throughout Florida and the international region. He has also taken a strong interest in strengthening the Miami business community where he has served on the Board of Directors for the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce and was appointed as a judge for the esteemed Rothschild Business Planning Competition at the University of Miami.