John Sandberg, of The Sandberg Nortmann Group, is the director of luxury sales for Douglas Elliman Florida.
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 John Sandberg, director of luxury sales for The Sandberg Nortmann Group of Douglas Elliman Florida, who shared his top ways to manage challenging personalities in real estate.
6. Know that the difference between doing small business and big business is dealing with personalities. At every level you’re going to deal with hard personalities, so being successful means learning to work with those personalities. In my experience, nothing is more satisfying than closing a deal that you know probably shouldn’t have closed.
5. Have patience. It’s not always easy to do, I know that more than most, but it’s a virtue necessary when negotiating with a tough personality.
4. People are going to do what they’re going to do. The best thing you can do is not tell you clients what to do, but leading them down the path to the best decision, and the way I do that is through my own experiences. Give examples from your own life to help illustrate your points. Obviously, not everyone will grab onto the idea, but it’s a good tool to have in your belt.
3. If there’s a problem along the closing path and you find out something your client isn’t going to want to hear, rip the Band-Aid. Collect your thoughts first, of course, but contact the client immediately and tell them the truth. It’s my experience that things go much smoother with clients when you just tell them the truth upfront, because they can’t blame you. On the flip side of that, if a client finds out something way down the road and you’ve know about it the whole time, that’s going to create a major divide in your relationship.
2. Agree with your clients. When your talking to a client about a particularly tough decision, and they want it to go one way but it can only go the other, listen to what they have to say, agree with them, but come back with a soft rebuttal to help ease them in the right direction.
1. Make sure to always respond. Real estate is a 24/7 business, not a 9 to 5 job, so when a client calls you, call them back. Unless it’s Sunday after 8pm, I respond immediately.
John Sandberg is a seasoned sales professional and financial expertwith more than 25 years in luxury real estate and finance. His expertnegotiation skills and deep reservoir of resources have consistently earned hima place in the top two percent of South Florida luxury real estate agents since 2007.