You're tuning in to Drive with NAR The Safety Series, powered by REALTOR® magazine in partnership with the REALTOR® Safety Program. Hear harrowing stories from real estate professionals who have faced danger in the field, and expert advice on how to work safely. Get more safety tips at nar.realtor/safety. Welcome everyone! Welcome to drive with NAR, the Safety Series. We're recording it live in front of an audience here in Boston.
We're grateful to have all of you with us here today at the conference. And those of you who are listening at home. Now conflict is a normal part of every relationship, whether business or personal and as real estate professionals we are likely to have disagreements with either clients or colleagues. So what we're doing today is we're talking about how to deal with a heated environment. So we know everyone's on edge at times.
So even minor disputes may feel like a bigger deal than they have to be. So the last thing you want is for a simple misunderstanding to become a big conflict or major source of issues for you and your business. So what do you do when a disagreement becomes heated? I have three professionals here today who are going to help us solve the problem. So let's go ahead and introduce them.
Harrison Beacher is a managing partner of the Coalition Properties Group and Keller Williams Capital Properties in Washington, DC. Welcome. Hello. Thanks for having me. And next we have Janet Judd. She is a broker manager at Remax Results in Saint Louis. And she had a previous career as a police officer. Welcome, Janet.
Okay. And Anne Enos is a director of professional development for Rhode Island REALTORS®, she's formerly a senior vice president and sales manager at Coldwell Banker in Warwick, Rhode Island. Hey Anne. Hey Tracy. Nice to see you. So first let's talk about what do we mean when we say de-escalation? When you think of that word, you automatically think an extreme situation sometimes maybe even a violent situation. So that is a risk of being a real estate agent.
But most times, real estate agents, you deal with situations that are nonviolent in nature, and you simply need to learn how to manage emotions. So what are we talking about here? When we talk about de-escalation in the context of real estate? So let's ask our experts. So Janet, as a former police officer, what does de-escalation mean to you? For me, it's and, you know, in all circumstances, it's just trying to bring the temperature of the room down.
If someone's a little bit heated, it's kind of like, you know, when water is on the stove and it's boiling, you just want to bring that back down. And you can do that by looking someone in the eyes, by listening, by tilting your head so they know that you're that that's a body language observation that they can see that you're listening. Because when you are, you're inclined to tilt your head. It's just human nature.
So it's just a way of trying to de-escalate by giving them the courtesy of listening. Okay. Thank you for that answer. Now, Anne you're an educator, how do you approach de-escalation? I think as professionals, we have to take charge of the situation, but in a way that resonates with the person who you're talking to, whether it's a client or whether it's a an agent.
And, you know, the old adage count to ten, because I think we have a tendency in our industry to be reactionary because we're always on the go. We're thinking about the next appointment, but just stop. Just stop. Take a breath, count to ten. And I think if you do it correctly, it tempers the other person where you're not reacting. So they have to kind of pay attention. Wonderful. Thank you for that answer. Now, Harrison, you're a negotiation expert. Can you define de-escalation?
So for me, I think of de-escalation as making a choice and having awareness. I've got my beautiful son on my shirt. He's two years old. If I look at how he approaches problems and frustrations in the world, he doesn't have all the tools to make the choices to do anything other than have that emotion that's right at the edge just explode.
So as a professional and in a professional context, we need to make a choice of if we're trying to still get forward to the resolution or if we want to be petty and prove a point and have our emotions win. So a lot of times it's just making that choice and having awareness for the situation of what those goals are and staying focused on it. But it does take discipline. It takes practice, and it takes having the correct tools to acknowledge when you need to use them to de-escalate a situation.
Sounds good to. Me. Tracy, may I add something? That my mantra it was that you cannot disturb my peace. You just want to go into situations like Anne was saying that knowing you want to be calm, take a breath, take time and silence can be golden. Sometimes letting someone just repeat themselves and you can repeat it back to them. Sometimes they'll hear what they're saying and readjust their position. Especially when it's heated and we’re the professional, we're the ones that have to take charge.
It just diffuses the situation there. I coach my team on the acronym wait. Ask yourself in a situation, why am I talking right now? Seriously, why am I talking right now? If I give space, if I give a little bit of a pause, that can help get us closer to a resolution than just filling the air or continuing to ratchet the emotions up. Right?
And I like how you all said pause and wait. As a safety instructor, I'm telling real estate agents before you meet a new client to meet them first and take the time to gauge the temperature. Like you said. Look at them. See what their demeanor is so that you can have a hopefully safe interaction with them. Let's talk communication style. And I know this is right up your alley.
So let's talk a little bit about knowing your own communication style and then assessing the consumer's communication style. How can that help with the escalation? I think a lot of us come into this profession somewhat ill equipped. To actually be conversant with people that we've never met before.
And, and pre license is kind of interesting as an educator to see people come into pre license and they have a blank piece of paper and when they leave pre license all of a sudden they invented real estate. They don't know who they are. And to their own self be true. So what I've found very beneficial. And it was a requirement at my prior company that we all took an assessment. Whether it's my A Briggs or, you know, the the latest and the greatest.
How you. Define that before you go on that this. Method. So it's a personality assessment. Bunch of questions. You have to on answer truthfully. But at the end of it, it kind of analyzes how you're wired. Now, when you go through this process, you can identify certain traits and the people that you communicate with. And we have to embrace the consumer that we're dealing with or the other agent that we're dealing with. If you can determine how they're wired.
Now, you can have communication where both of you kind of meet each other in the middle. Okay. So I like that everyone needs to take a risk assessment. So that's on our homework list. Okay. Now, Janet, in your line of business. In your former lifetime, communication was a life or death situation. So talk to us about how your communication style and knowing your consumers communication style can help de-escalate a situation.
I think everyone has a superpower, and I think my superpower is observation. So I tend to watch, tend to listen. And for me, it's observing someone's body language. And from there, you know, I don't want to use the word judgmental, but I guess I do get that way because I will form an opinion instantly. And we do this whether you're doing it unconsciously or not. You know, the first thing how they answer the door, how they respond to you, how they shake your hand, etc. so you're doing it.
It's a something inside of you that you'll learn how to do, even better when you start listening to it. We're all chameleons in some way, and it's like, Anne was talking about that sometimes we have to shift a little bit like these shape shifters, depending on who we're with. You know, if someone's a fast talker, you might slow the conversation down a little bit. If they're a slow talker, you might talk slow also. So you're always being a chameleon.
You have to be aware of it, but being an observer first can make all the difference in the world. And that's what police officers do, is it's just something in me that I do. I just watch and then I'll correct or address or say something. And that's a skill set anyone can have. Okay. Sounds good. Now you mentioned, being judgmental. So in your line of work, I know that everyone is born with a tool that can help them stay safe.
So instead of judging a book by its cover or judging something on the surface, we all, we all have a tool to talk about that tool. It's your instinct. You had that little angel on your shoulder. So when something comes up in your life, I want you to listen and believe what your ears are hearing. Believe what your eyes are seeing and listen to that instinct. And it can hit you just in that little nanosecond. But if you trust it, it's always going to work.
So and when you start listening to your instinct, you're going to start going, wow. Yeah. I didn't get run over. Yeah I handled this right. Yes. This worked. So it's just a matter of listening to your environment, listening to the people that are in it, seeing it, taking it in. And then you can respond accordingly. But you have to speak their language. Yes, you have your own. And that's what the task and emotional intelligence does for you.
But if you speak French and they speak Swahili, you're going to be like ships in the night where the professional, we're the ones that should listen to your your gut, but also be intuitive enough to know how they communicate with you and how you need to respond and the language that resonates with them. And I cannot stress both of you said intuition. I can't stress that enough. Every animal in nature is born with a built in survival mechanism that is hardly ever wrong.
Instinct. Intuition. Gut six sense flight or flight. My buddy Carl Carter calls it Spidey sense. Whatever you want to call it, every animal in nature has it. So listening to your gut is the great first step before any words are spoken. And, just respecting that voice. Now, how about you tell us a little bit about how you, from your position, deal with communication issues, how you recognize your communication style when you're working with clients with different styles.
It's challenging man, because like, I'm someone that's programed off of positive reinforcement. And if something has worked very well for a lot of people, for a while, then I may try to go back into that same rhythm, style of communication or problem solving pathway.
But, what I've learned from having to deal with both my own transactional issues and having to coach and support my agents through their transactional issues is that while I've got a wide range of experience, I've had to really humble myself to say, hey, in this situation, if people are not responding in a way, if you get that gut feeling like, are they all crazy? Is it me? Or is it that I hope who is the crazy one in this situation? Or did I just not experienced this before?
So I need to be humble. I need to take a step back, kind of look at the entire board and like I said earlier, orient and kind of anchor yourself to what that final goal is and then try to get everybody to make some incremental movement towards it. Because sometimes when situations get extremely heated and people have a lot of emotion and rightfully so, right? These are huge transactions. There's lots of unknowns.
In the Washington, DC area, we have a lot of highly educated people who are extremely confident and really successful and everything else in life. So they expect that everything, the transaction will go the same way. I've got to respectfully humble them as well, but do it with the correct anchors that keep them engaged. Don't offend them, and if it does offend them, apologize quickly. Move forward.
Like there's so much about this humility piece that I think is important here, and that we got to realize we don't have all the answers all the time. We do have the correct pathways to get people there, but if we get it wrong upfront, own it. Be honest about it. Be open with the communication and keep moving towards a goal. I like that you said be honest. Own it and apologize if necessary. Wow. I mean, how simple, but how impactful.
I believe in storytelling, especially in the real estate safety world. So let's talk a little bit about experiences that you all have had, situations that you faced in business where you had to employ de-escalation tactics. And let's talk about what you did that worked. Let's start with you Anne. I have a couple of instances, actually, instance that really blew my mind. We were not the listing agent. We were on the buy side, so we didn't hold escrow. The deal fell apart.
The buyer wanted their deposit back. We didn't hold. The listing agent did. And he threatened management staff that he was coming into the office with his shotgun. That's when I needed you. Yep. Therefore, it was like, oh, my God, what do I do with this? Thankfully. And it comes back to education. Everything that we're talking about is exposure to skills. You know, the manifestation of skills, a continuing of sharpening skills throughout your career.
Thankfully, myself and my admins, we were astute enough to kind of get a group together. So if this gentleman did come back with his shotgun, we had a backup plan. Thank you for sharing that. Could you share your story? Well, not too long ago I had a, listing and the radon came in high. It came in like, at eight peak liters. And we all know that it's four that you're supposed to mitigate. Well, my seller was convinced that this was a hoax. It's a conspiracy.
It's a medical joke that, you know, I wasn't representing him well because I was like, well, it's got high radon. We've got a mitigate. And he just took off on me, took off on the buyer, took off on everyone involved to the point that he was insulting. And I remember thinking if I was in person, I would remove myself from the situation. You know, I would say, excuse me, I've got to go, I've got another appointment, etc. but I was on the phone with him and I really wanted to hang up.
But I couldn't do that because he's a client. And the thing about it in my head, I always remember that clients. They're your boss for a short amount of time. Maybe four months, right? Maybe four months, three months, something like that. And I'm like, all right, he's my boss for four month. I can take this. But then he was just so derogatory that I ended up sending him a firm email, sending him information about radon. And then I didn't speak to him for a day.
I was like, let him let him digest all of this. And then when I called him again the day after, he was calmer. He was more receptive to listening because I didn't let him. I mean, I had let him vent, but I didn't let him go to overboard on it, had a boundary enforced it. Felt really proud of myself for not chewing back. And then we were able to get it negotiated.
So your de-escalation technique was education, and the safety expert in me just simply has to say the radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer, right behind cigarettes. So when he heard and saw the facts, he couldn't dispute it. Now I know you have to have a story, a de-escalation story, or a situation where you de-escalated it. Why don't you share with us? We got a few. We got a few. I had a condominium in Washington, DC. Nice neighborhood. Expensive.
Should have been over a million bucks. I'm helping the buyers listings. Been on the market for a while. Multiple red flags as agents. Know when something's on the market for a while, no price drops. Pictures are a little wonky. I'm like, oh, man, that's gone. This going to be one of those. So reach out to the agent. Don't get really good communication. Initially was able to show it and say, hey, I want to send you an offer. My clients really wanted it.
And in my gut at first I'm like, man, I don't do I really want these problems because my clients are both attorneys, both very smart, very type A, very successful in life. So they are going to get the deal, right? They're going to they're those buyers. I'm like challenging agent to difficult buyers. How is this going to actually work out when we get down to the time of actually writing an offer? When they did respond, the agent was short with me. Got angry with a lot of the things we did.
Of course, my Type-A clients wrote a lowball offer because that's what they were going to do anyway. They had to be rejected by her, but we actually did get some pretty significant concession. And after we get to the inspection time frame, after getting a lot of price off up front, what am I clients want another $30,000 for, you know, pain and suffering and frustration on both sides. They were escalated because they felt they deserved a better deal
with all the information they had. With all their training. They were determined to get like the deal, the better deal. That got them kind of heightened emotionally on the seller side. And talking with her about it, she was just kind of done with everything and more context. Listing agent was also the seller and independent broker, so all one person nobody, nobody up a food chain to talk to but her and everything was we we love those.
And so we're getting to the point of negotiating on inspection. I'm reaching out to her by phone, by email. I had to end up actually connecting with her in person and go sitting face to face to say, all right, I know this is going to be challenging, but let's just get together and talk about it. Another important lesson in this story is that you got to sometimes just eat the frog man, do the hard thing, do the the difficult thing, that hard conversation you don't want to have.
It's not going to get any easier by pushing it off, avoiding it. And I know my clients wanted this extra concession. I knew she was being real, you know, dismissive of it. So I get together, we talk. In that conversation, I found out that associated with that unit she was selling was a traumatic personal family event. So she had a ton of emotion connected to. It. It wasn't logical. There was nothing that was logical in all of it. We ended up getting a little bit more concession off.
Not what my clients thought, but it was something to keep things moving. And that key information of knowing that she had this whole extra set of baggage associated with the property allowed me, for the rest of that transaction, to move with a little bit more grace, a little bit more, you know, consideration and be nicer to her. But it was just having that key information from that side and also allowing my clients to do essentially what they were determined to do anyway.
Right. We're going to get the best deal. We're going to push for it. They didn't get what they sought, but they got something. And it was just kind of looking at the whole board, elevating it. That frog do the challenging thing. It helped de-escalate. Deal got to closing. We all are constantly on a journey of learning and utilizing these tools, even intense situations. And you negotiate it that I hear the negotiation and you also have earned NAR’s designation the negotiation designation.
Tell us about that. For sure. So one of the most important tools, in my kind of growth and sales career was becoming at the time, it was called a certified negotiation expert, from the center for REALTOR® Development. But I know Anne has the newer versions that she's teaching. Yeah, that, what what's available now is R E N E. Don't call it Renny. real estate negotiation expert. And it's a series of kind of workshops where you actually have case studies to go through.
We all negotiate every, every minute of every day, whether it's your children, your spouse, your partner, the dog. In my case, you know, we negotiate. But now this is focused and concentrated on the skill set. So you need to serve your client in the best way you can and still maintain relationships and hopefully, you know, get the transaction completed.
And there was some great data from it that talked about the number of people who actually go into directed study around negotiations at something under 2 or 5% of professionals actually study it directly. So it was an immediate differentiator. It gave me outstanding kind of pathway scripts ideas, and I use it everywhere in life, not just in real estate. You use it with your kids. I use it with my husband, with my mom.
So it's not just the negotiation skills that you learn are not just for transactions, but you're using it to de-escalate. Absolutely. So definitely, Janet, you would say that agents here need to consider the RENE designation. It's a great certification. It's a great point of difference too that when you go on a listing call, this is a point of difference that you took this education to help your clients, and it's going to differentiate you from other agents. So you're differentiating yourself.
You know, using your skills, your negotiation skills. Okay, here's what we're going to do now. We're going to wrap it up with a call to action. I need all of you to tell your fellow agents out here what they need to do to de-escalate situations going forward. Any tool that you have, any practice that you have, what do they need to know? So give them homework or give them a call to action in dealing with the situation. Let's start with you, Harrison. Remember that acronym?
Wait, why am I talking allow for the uncomfortable space to exist sometimes when emotions are high, because a lot of times things can calm down with just a little bit more space. And one of the more important things I actually learned this in, like relationship therapy, if things are really hot and going off the rails, you ask that question to the person who's coming at you with a high level of emotion. Do you want to find a resolution or do you want to be heard? What would you like right now?
I'm giving you the and if you ask in that way and if they're already kind of hot, they might be just angry and they'll keep quiet. But it kind of anchors that here. I'm trying to either get to a resolution or I'm trying to hear you, because right now, this path that we're going down, we're not going to accomplish much. But that was something that I've used a couple times before, more so with agent and internal stuff.
But if you have the control, the discipline and the toolset that we're talking about, you can definitely create a little bit of space, de-escalate and move forward to accomplish that goal of getting the deal done. Sounds good. Janet, what are your marching orders for your fellow agents? Well, I've got a couple. It's about, you know, trusting your instincts and being more observant. And that's all part of that process. And if you do have to walk away from a situation, don't apologize.
Don't apologize. So if you have to like if, like I said, I let that seller stew on something. You don't have to apologize. Say I'm sorry. I'm going to have to call you back tomorrow. You're just going to say we're going to schedule is for 3:00 tomorrow. Oh, and you don't have to apologize for that. Oh. I like that. And what about you? What are your marching orders? For me a lot of what we're talking about is concentrated on respect. And, you know, we all abide under the code of ethics.
But the next time you take your code course would you please pay attention to the three pieces that are part of the code? Professionalism in respect for your peers, respect for the property and respect for the public. I think if that is front and center in everything that we do, there are over 90 elements in those three categories where it kind of keeps us on track. And so that would be my recommendation as well as the desk, of course. That's good and wonderful. So you all have marching orders.
I want to thank you all so much for joining us here today at NAR NXT here in Boston. And I also want to be sure to thank our listeners at home for tuning in. I'm learning how to build stronger relationships. Be Safe. Thank you for joining us on Drive With NAR the Safety Series. New episodes drop every month at magazine.realtor/drive or wherever you get your podcast. Members are encouraged to use only those safety tools in which they're properly trained.
Additionally, the views, opinions and concepts described on this podcast are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice on any subject matter. We encourage listeners to consult with their own legal counsel. Find more safety resources at nar.realtor/safety.