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The most important thing in a shifting market is your client’s \u201cwhy\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the foundational element for working with buyers (or really any client but I\u2019ll use buyers in this example) in a shifting market. Because things are by nature changing (I mean that is what shifting is right?) its very natural for people to be worried, scared, confused and more. The more you can understand WHY they are thinking of buying right now. Buying a house is stressful. Buying a house in a shifting market is even more stressful. They\u2019ve gone from \u201cI may never be able to buy a house\u201d to \u201cis now the right time to buy a house\u201d. You\u2019ve got to discover their why because we either move towards pleasure or away from pain. To help them thorough the process you\u2019ve got to understand the pain they are experiencing, the pleasure on the other side of buying and moving and do those equal enough desire to move forward in the current market conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is helping them see the shore. There is a famous story about Florence Chadwick who  was the first woman to swim the English Channel- a round trip\u2026 there AND back. And she did it. After that she decided to swim across the Catalina Channel and she swam for 16 hours in the fog and was just a half a mile away from the shore when she quit. She is even quoted as saying: \u201cLook, I\u2019m not excusing myself, but if I could have seen land I might have made it.\u201d She quit because she couldn\u2019t see her \u201cwhy\u201d and she didn\u2019t know how close she was to the shore. A link to her whole story is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not to wax poetic but our role is to be the wind the blows the fog out of the process so they can always (or usually) see the land. So they can understand WHY they are going through all this. At it\u2019s most simple that is what we do. You\u2019ve got to get really good at understanding, discovering and sometimes helping them discover their \u201cwhy\u201d. And then push as much out of the way of their vision (aforementioned fog) so they can see the shore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We all get programed with default answers to questions. The things we say are often not a lie their just the mental scripts we\u2019ve developed for answering questions. To really get to someone\u2019s \u201cwhy\u201d and get past their mental scripts they have I have found two things to be really really important:<\/p>\n\n\n